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margate

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Posts posted by margate

  1. Off the heels of your post, I remembered to go ahead and decline Buffalo. Hope that helps some lucky Am Studies scholar!

    Just to chime in (since I'm apparently procrastinating this morning) from my own experiences last year -- If you're declining an offer, make sure to go through whatever online system they have -- just telling the Department itself isn't "officially" enough. If you're not certain whether a particular program has some online button to press, ask. I let several programs know in early April that I wouldn't be attending, but then got e-mails/phone calls from them on/around April 15, because they needed an "official" decline before they could offer someone on their waitlist. So help out the programs and the waitlisters, and avoid my mid-April guilt.

  2. Re: Vandy -- perhaps this was just coincidence, but I got my rejection less than 24 hours after e-mailing to let them know that even though I hadn't heard anything from them, I was accepting an offer elsewhere and letting them know. It was amusing.

    I see from the results page that five Vanderbilt "secret waitlisters" (it sounds so much cooler than it is...) have been rejected. Is there anyone else (like me) who is on this list but hasn't heard anything?

    Also, have any Maryland waitlisters heard anything?

  3. There was that one lone waitlisted via snail mail results board post. . .

    I don't remember whether I posted it on the board or not, but I got a wait-list letter -- it sounded like the department was holding off on sending letters until they heard back from the university about possibly getting more funding for more spots, but they still haven't heard anything, so they went ahead and sent out wait-list letters. I don't know if everyone on the WL got one, or if other letters went out; it was a pretty exasperated letter on their part -- like they were going through with the university what it sounds like many of us have gone through when trying to figure out whether there's any method to the madness in the notification system, or what silence/non-commital responses mean.

  4. I'm sure that you'll get a flood of conflicting answers to this thread, but my two cents say that your GRE scores, while not freakishly high (i.e. 700+ verbal / 6.0 AW) like the scores of some who are accepted into super elite programs, shouldn't detract from an application if your other materials are strong and if you are a good fit for the program. You're getting rejections simply because regardless of scores, it's an incredibly competitive time to be applying to graduate study in English. Some programs are accepting/funding 5 or less people out of the hundreds who applied. It obviously helps to have higher scores, but a more productive use of time would be in tailoring your application to specific programs and to revising your writing sample, statement of intent, and CV. My scores are 670 V, 5.5 AW, and 650 Subject. I didn't get into Harvard, but I did get into some strong programs; after speaking to faculty at these programs, it has become quite clear that I went from the short list to the list of actual offers because I was a good fit for the department and faculty, not because of my scores.

    Some programs prefer applicants not to have an MA, whiles others prefer the opposite. Most programs accept a mix of BA-only and MA-already applicants. Penn State, for example, offers only 1 or 2 spots per year to applicants who already have an MA; the rest of the 12-18 spots go to BA-only applicants.

    What he said.

    (EDIT: Or she! How is one to know, behind internet anonymity?)

  5. Vanderbilt, too.

    And no one has mentioned the potential for disaster that expecting ETS to send the correct scores to the correct places by the correct date can be. As a heads-up: if you had a different mailing address when you took the GRE General from when you took the GRE Subject, you should call to make sure they have merged the damn files. I learned this the hard way 3 hours before a flight in late December.

    I agree, and I hope this is true. When I was applying, I made a long list of schools which don't require the subject test because I didn't want to have to take it. Unfortunately, many of these schools which don't require the subject test do accept scores from it and use these scores to make funding if not admission decisions--which is why I ended up taking it.

    Other schools which don't require the test include: Penn, Penn State, UMass (American Studies Concentration), Washington, Florida, SUNY Buffalo, Brown, Kansas, Oregon, Minnesota, UNC, UC Santa Cruz, Ohio State, and Duke

  6. I wanted to weigh in on the GRE discussion. I agree with what most people have said thatwhile GRE scores aren’t a great tool, grad schools and departments do use themin conjunction with GPA to both eliminate candidates with very low scores whothey won’t look at any closer and to decide who to offer fellowships to.

    That said, the GRE—both the subject and general tests—is teachable. I used to be a general GRE instructor for avery large test prep company—one of the two who’ve heard of if you’ve heard ofany. Their courses are pricey, but ifyou don’t do better on your final test than you did on your first choice, youget your money back. If you’re strugglingwith the test, I strongly recommend taking a course—not only for theinstruction but also for the 8 computer adaptive tests that you have access to.

    About the changes to the test, both sections of the test arechanging. I would strongly recommendtaking the test before the changes because there in a lot of knowledge outthere about how to beat the existing test. On the current verbal section, if you learn the 200 to 1,000 vocabularywords which the GRE uses heavily, which if you’re planning on getting a degreein English you probably already know, and if you have the opportunity topractice how they’re used on the test, you can get a very good score.

    One of the changes which is coming to the test is that they are getting rid of analogies. This is not good news for people who study for the test because the analogies are the most teachable part of the verbal section.

    Don’t worry too much about the quantitative section. As long as you do above average, you’re doinggreat.

    No matter what make sure that you finish every question ineach section. You get at least 100 pointsjust for finishing each section.

    Practice your pacing. Be systematic about how you study. There’s a lot of information out there about how to study for thegeneral test, so I won’t say any more.

    About the subject test:

    I didn’t realize that it’s something you can study for, butit really is. My undergraduate programhad essentially no breadth requirements within the English major, and in mylast year I realized that I had studied just American and Irish writers after1850. I quickly took a Shakespearecourse and a course on the metaphysical poets, and studied my ass off. It took me six months of serious study, but Imoved from a score in the 20th percentile (ouch, that wasdemoralizing) to a score in the 85th percentile.

    Here’s my advice:

    Read/skim the Norton Anthology (I just used the Major Authorsedition which is only one volume, but I probably would have done a littlebetter if I had used the complete 2 volume edition).

    Identity your weaker areas (periods, genres, literary terms,etc), and read widely but not deeply on them.

    Get the Princeton Review prep book. Their advice is very good. Particularly, their study strategies and targetscore formula are good. For example, Ifound that after studying, when I was reasonably confident in the answer of aquestion, I had—averaged across the whole test—about an 80% chance of gettingthe answer correct. Therefore, in orderto get the score I wanted, I needed to answer about 90% of the questions on thetest.

    Get all the practice tests. As far as I know, there are 7 practice tests in existence: 1 which ETSwill send you when you register, 1 in the Princeton Review book (it’s the sametest in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Editions), 3 inthe other practice book in existence (black and yellow cover, I can’t rememberthe name), and 2 in an out of print book published by ETS which I was able tofind on eBay (these two tests were the most similar tests to the actual test).

    Practice your pacing. There are 230 questions in 170 minutes. Also, know that the proctors in the actual exam are not allowed to giveany indication about time except for a 20 minute warning. Keeping track of your own time is essential,and nobody tells you this. It took me agood four to five practice tests to get my pacing down. Every Saturday morning for two months beforethe test, at 8 am, I sat down and took a test. I wrote out the quarter, half, and three-quarters time marks as well asmy target question number for each time period. If that hadn’t been automatic by test day, I would have been sunk.

    Lastly, make allowances for yourself and the way you taketests. For me, this meant admitting thatI would get a better score if I allowed myself a 5 minute break three quartersof the way through the exam.

    I hope this helps. Rightly or wrongly, test scores do get used by departments whenevaluating students, but the good news is that the tests are teachable.

    Best of luck UST.

    For what it's worth, subject-test-wise, the best thing I did to study (without realizing it!) was to take a survey course in pre-1798 British lit. There's shockingly little on the exam from after 1900, so be warned.

  7. Anyone willing to claim it? I seem to remember them notifying over a couple of days last year.

    The one by phone was me. I got a phone call this morning from the professor in charge of admissions. She definitely mentioned having had trouble getting hold of people, which may explain why there's now an e-mail on the board.

  8. One thing that I would say right off the bat, partially because I think I could have done a better job myself, is research the programs and the professors like crazy. Several of my apps didn't go much further than a few hours of browsing the website, surveying the kind of academics at the school, and getting a general sense of what the department is all about. As a result my tailoring wasn't as strong as it might have been, and as I've already been hit with a few rejections, I can look at them and think that the add comm's probably did a good job as somebody out there did more research as was more committed to that particular program. However, there were two or three where I really did the research work and pinpointed specifically why those places would be best for me. Consequently, I think this enthusiasm will be evident in my submissions, more-so than the ones that just got the brief overview.

    Google Books and/or Amazon's "preview" feature (or your university library, I suppose) are wonderful tools for this. So is Google Scholar, even if all you get are titles and/or abstracts -- that's more than the faculty webpage will offer, and often more than a CV will, if you're lucky enough to find one. I narrowed my list of schools and POIs based on CVs and descriptions of interests on faculty pages, and then skimmed their actual publications and took notes before I wrote each statement. It's not that you have to fully read each article or book -- I mostly just skimmed introductions and conclusions of books (depended on what was available), maybe doing the same with a particularly relevant chapter; and since I no longer have access to JSTOR, I wasn't able to burn too much time on articles.

    If there are other fields that also deal with some of your interests, investigate their departments, too; see what type of official/unofficial cooperation among students and professors there might be.

  9. And ... a definition of the 50% load for TAing:

    50% equates to leading two 1-hour discussion sections that are tied to a (usually) large lecture-style undergraduate course led by a faculty member. It can also take the form of teaching one section of English 4W, our undergraduate literature-based composition course.
  10. I just received a reply to some questions about post-first year funding from Michael Lambert. The relevant portions:

    Quote
    TA salaries are divided into three tiers (Teaching Assistant, Teaching Associate, and Teaching Fellow), based on experience. Most entering students begin their TA work as a Teaching Assistant, then advance to Teaching Associate in the second year of TA, and to Teaching Fellow after advancing to candidacy for the Ph.D. (Some who enter our program with already a year or more of college-level teaching experience start at the Teaching Associate level.) The salaries are renegotiated each year with the union which represents the TAs. Current yearly salaries for the three tiers are as follows:

     

    Teaching Assistant: $16,969.50

     

    Teaching Associate: $18,941

     

    Teaching Fellow: $19,896

     

     

     

     

    These salary figures are based on 50%-of-full-time positions, which are the norm for students in our program. They carry with them a benefit called “fee remission”, which covers in-state registration and tuition (currently approximately $4,200 per quarter), including health coverage. Students working as TAs are responsible for a small amount of additional fees (roughly $119 per quarter). TAs in good standing are also allowed, with the permission of UCLA’s Graduate Division, to accept additional part-time campus employment when available (such as Readership positions) in addition to their TA appointments.

    I'm not certain how many courses a quarter 50% is, however. Just wanted to share the numbers, since they weren't in my letter and I couldn't find them on the website.

  11. I didn't apply to Rhet/Comp programs, and I don't know how well this applies to your given situation, but:

    I majored in both Classics and English, but spent more of my time/energy in Classics, including an undergrad thesis that became my writing sample. My SOP talked about 20th/21st c. Jewish-American fiction; my writing sample was a study of a Greek poet from the Archaic period. It sort of showed something of the theoretical approach to literature that I was claiming I'd use in graduate study, but only if you were looking for it. The more important thing was that it showed I could write well, think clearly, and do literary research. I could have used things "more related" to my field, but I went with the stronger paper and applications have been going pretty well so far.

    On the other hand -- you've got plenty of time. Contact departments you're interested in, and see whether they do, in fact, care.

  12. I think they might actually be reimbursing expenses for the visiting days, although I'm not sure. Their graduate advisor told me he'd be sending out more information this week about the visiting days, and it sounded as though they will be covering some expenses like food, travel, etc. Again, I'm not sure, but it seemed implied. We should know for sure by week's end, though.

    I got an e-mail back from him saying that a schedule and travel expense information would be coming soon -- it sounded like there's definitely SOME money, but that they're trying to figure out exactly how much, and how to divide it up.

  13. I applied to eight schools while working on my thesis last year. Believe it or not, I was less stressed out then, because the thesis took my mind off of applications! This year I'm just working, so there's very little to distract me.

    Ditto. Of course, I think one of my problems with last year's set of applications was that I used them to take my mind off my (undergraduate) thesis, rather than the other way around... On the other hand, the thesis won an award, which came with some cash, so there's that. (Unfortunately, $200 does not equal a year's funding...)

  14. Which begs the question, what did you do different this year? As someone who is looking at a possible 0-11 this season (no notifications, but 5 of my 11 have notified acceptances), inquiring minds want to know and what not. :)

    I don't know how relevant this is, because I went 0-for-too-many in a different field last year (Classics), but: after a series of life crises in which I realized -- after submitting applications but before hearing back from any -- that I probably would be miserable in a Classics PhD. program (for which my Latin was probably too weak anyway; I'm a Hellenophile thru and thru). And eventually I realized I still wanted to teach, and that I should never have talked myself out of English programs, blah blah. But last year I didn't even know why I wanted to go to graduate school. And that came through in every part of my applications, I think.

    The biggest difference is that I now have some idea of what a statement of purpose is. Compared to what I wrote this year, I'm embarrassed at the thought of anyone reading what I sent out last cycle. This is going to sound stereotypical, but: be FOCUSED and be CONFIDENT. Try to avoid saying what everyone's thinking. Last year's were trite and rambling; this year's were tight and knew what they were about. (Even if I'd gotten in nowhere, I'd feel this way about SOPs -- in fact, I was worried they were still trite and rambling.)

    My writing sample was also much stronger: last year's was a good paper (I presented it at a conference and got a lot of positive feedback), but nowhere near the quality of what I used this year, the strongest chapter of my undergraduate thesis (which is about Greek poetry from the Archaic period -- so not everywhere seems to want your sample to match your interests).

    Finally, and no one really wants to hear this, but not applying as an undergraduate (while losing my mind trying to write a thesis) was a big help. Even my extreme under-employment was useful: I had plenty of time to work and worry, all in the same day. Not to mention that I didn't even write my writing sample until this time last year.

    And keep your chin up. I was convinced I was going to have no options other than Buffalo's M.A. program until about 1:45 this afternoon. And if there was any thought worse than no option for next year, it was my only option being PAYING to live in BUFFALO. (I dug my car out of several feet of snow last Thursday; I'm still traumatized.)

  15. I got my acceptance email at 2pm today. 18000 + 3000 for the summer for the first year. TAships and dissertation fellowships after that (no specific number given). I think I just had a heart attack.

    I got an e-mail with roughly the same information. And had basically the same reaction.

  16. Attempt reading long hefty novels that you won't ever have time for in grad school.

    Bourbon.

    Cook something. Preferably something time-consuming and difficult that you're convinced you'll fail in making. Because then, when you succeed in making something edible, you'll be reminded that certain failure is not always so certain...

    Clean. (I finally got around to giving the kitchen sink a thorough scrubbing in the last 48 hours.)

    Attempt to learn another language.

    Finally, and most important: strive to become the world's foremost champion in computer Solitaire, Hearts, and Minesweeper.

  17. I applied last year, got my hopes way up about multiple waves of admits . . . and there was only one. Be prepared for rejections; their number of applicants tripled last year, and it looks like it's stayed steady this year, with no more $ and therefore no more spots.

    Good luck with your other schools! I did not reapply here.

    The e-mail I got said 250+ applications for 13 spots.

    Also, if you're the person in the results (or elsewhere!) who mentioned having gone through Buffalo's MA program, I may want to assault you with questions. It depends on how the rest of the season goes for me. (And I thought I was impatiently awaiting to hear back BEFORE yesterday afternoon...)

  18. I applied to UB. I have yet to hear anything (no e-mails and no status change on the website). I see on the results board that there are 2 admit posts and 1 wait-list post. I wonder if rejections will go out later. Did your status change at all on the web site?

    I'm early-modern/Shakespeare, and Graham Hammill was the prof I was looking to work with.

    I'm 20th century; I think I heard from Prof. Hammill because of he's one of the graduate coordinators. As for the website, mine still says "Not Reviewed" so at the very least they haven't updated wait-listed ones yet.

  19. So I've been out here lurking for a while (and, like everyone, hitting refresh too many times), but I just received an e-mail from Graham Hammill letting me know I'm on their PhD. wait-list. (That was me on the results page.) Over 250 applicants for 13 spots, apparently; the wait-listing came with an unofficial (details to come, apparently) acceptance into their M.A. program.

    Has anyone else heard anything?

    Anyway, I guess I've got mixed feelings -- but it's certainly better than the days when I still thought I wanted to be a Classicist and went 0-for-everything.

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