Yellow#5

I didn't mean to scare you away from the S.End. I've been pretty happy there for almost 5 years. I lived in Davis Square also for about 3 years and the people in the S. End are definitely more "colorful" and ecclectic while Davis is mostly Students and pretty laid back. There are some local soup kitchens in the S.End neighborhood like Rosie's Place, so some of those colorful characters are homeless or living in subsidized housing, but I've always felt that they are a part of the neighborhood, more so than in other Boston neighborhoods, and so you won't get that aggressive, harrasing/desperate panhandling that you'll find around the Boston Common near the theatre district. Sometime you'll get asked for change, (not too often) but generally, you'll just wind up sitting next to someone at Starbucks with many many bags of aluminum cans. Anyone you find having a full blown meltdown, talking to themselves, waving their arms and cussing at people for "walking too close to them" is probably a hedge-fund manager or a self proclaimed "venture capitalist." A guy like this used to live in my building. When the gourmet chocolate store opened on the corner, he actually went in there around christmas, claimed to be collecting money for the block associations wreath fund and tried to shake them down for a couple hundred bucks. No joke.

I live in the S. End, and there are some very nice townhomes, but it is not Wellsley. In between the 3.2 mil. renovated brownstones are low income housing. It's a very mixed neighborhood, so, sorry to break it to you, but you will sometimes be harrassed on the way to the subway. It's all part of the fun of the city. Get yourself a map and trace the square created by the Copley Mall, Clarendon Street, Tremont Street and Mass Ave and live inside that square.

Ha! Next you'll post that there are four beautiful women fighting over you; two are current models, but only for Sears catalogues; 2 are FORMER Victoria secret models (note, that's FORMER), and you've noticed one of them has a slightly longer second toe than her big toe. The second one seems perfect, except she doesn't like "Family Guy" and all your uttered speech quotes exclusively from "Family Guy" so you worry that the two of you don't share any common values. Was that your next question? Life is hard.

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Oh yeah, forgot East Boston! Very convenient to the city, but only if you never ever ever ever drive or take a cab there, because they just put up a hellacious toll on the only road in which they share with the airport.

Doesn't UBC charge 0 tuition?

Congrats Orinin. That is random that they just send out the envelopes by snail mail, no phone call or anything, especially when BU is one of the last PhD programs in English to notify. You could have accepted another offer in the 6 days it took for their envelope to reach you. But awesome news all the same!

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" It's definitely easier to get through a day of work with that green light on somewhere out there...of course, I know it ended bad for Gatsby, but isn't it always bad when it ends?

DE, When you study for the Subj. Test, don't go too in depth! Get the Norton Anthology of Literature, read the chapter intros closely and skim the lit. selections. Maybe supplement it with SparkNote outlines of English Lit., depending on how widely you've read. Get the Princeton Review test prep. There are many, but I found that one to be the best. One more tip, don't sacrifice GRE Verbal study time for the English Subject Matter test. I've heard from many people that the GRE Verbal is more important to ad coms than the Subj. Matter Test.

I felt my SoP was unfocused because I mentioned too many interests. Do those of you who got accepted think it's better to simply state one interests and not try and discuss supporting interests?

I agree, UCSB is a lovely student town. The downtown is very small and compact and only 30 minutes by bus from the campus ( a beautiful drive along the beach on the 101 freeway!) There is a farmers market 2x a week downtown and the atmosphere is very casual and very friendly both near the campus in Isla Vista and downtown in the city of Santa Barbara. Rent might be a little expensive, but otherwise, living is pretty easy in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara, apart from the student culture, is also full of very wealthy people. San Diego, a larger city has all different income levels ("normal" people). San Diego is a little more spread out. You might need a car there. It is a much larger city. Apart from quality of life, only you can say which of your 4 choices is the stronger department for your interests and which school will get you more local job opportunities if you are trying to get hired right out of school. Everyone knows California has great weather, but you probably can't tell from looking at a map how different the two California Schools are from each other.

I think everybody knows it and doesn't care. They figure they'll carry on as long as they can, and just take a shitty job they hate in 9 years instead of right now. Frankly, I've seen a big change in the humanities since I decided not to go straight to grad school in 1999 and went to law school instead. Scholarship was very negative. The wholy deconstruction thing set out to make every word coming from the humanites seem useless and a big inside joke. There was a serious inferiority complex with the sciences and literature departments seemed to want to expunge everything that was great about the discipline from the discipline. I find there is much more useful thinking going on these days and over the past 2-3 years I've been drawn back in. I think that the continuation of the humanites requires that each faculty play some role in their immeadiate community and engage the general public somehow instead of deriding and excluding them. I don't mean "teaching" either, since, as the article and some posters point out, frequent activities takes away from research. I simply mean the presenting research should be more public. I know several older semi-retired literature enthusiasts who have tried to go to conferences and take part as simply a lover of literature, and have found scholars unwelcoming and snotty. This is why the humanities are perishing. Artists know enough to cultivate and engage their wealthy enthusiasts and literature and theory scholars go out of their way to keep "layman" or wealthy connoiseurs out of their circle, even out of the audience.

Scarlet, Thanks for the deets. I saw your posting on the results page, and I thought there were 10-12 MA spots AND 5-7 PhDs. Thanks for clarifying. Tough year indeed.

Thanks for the proper naming of yours truly :wink:

I got a wave of rejections Friday, expected, but demoralizing none the less. From time to time, I volunteer with Citizen Schools, which is a Boston area organization that helps high school kids "at risk" of not graduating, learn the necessary skills to, not only graduate, but apply, get accepted and thrive in college. I gave them a small donation and it made me feel better. I know that not everyone can afford to give even a little to these kinds of programs, but volunteering is a great thing to do to take our minds off our problems and re-affirm our own commitments to education. Way back in January on MLK day, I spent the day at the Citizen Schools and did a workshops with some High School Juniors. We talked about the power of the federal government to effect change vs. the individual's capacity to do so throughout our several activities. When my kid pulled a card with historical facts about Rosa Parks we talked about this theme a little bit and one of my kids was making the point that Rosa Parks changed the law about blacks having equal rights in the south before the federal government did. Of course, she was incorrect about that, because the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were passed after the Civil War and technically, blacks in the South did have equal rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution, and I pointed out to her that it took almost one hundred years for those rights to be made real, through the actions of people like Rosa Parks. I was very gentle about how I brought this up and I wrote down the dates and asked her to do the subtraction, then let her draw her own conclusion about that discrepency. Well, she was a bit stunned, and even left the room for 15 minutes or so, because I think she was pretty upset to learn this. She was a black girl, and this MLK day was, of course, just after Barack Obama's inauguration, so I'm sure she was feeling very optimistic about the world, that it was a fair place where racism might exist, but certainly doesn't prevent a black man from being president. Though, I was sad to be the one to ruin her day, I was also struck by how little high school kids really think about history and how little opportunity many people get in their lives to really ponder the world they live in, because it is such a huge luxury for some. Probably she had heard all these "facts" before, but never really thought about the significance of the 14th Amendment's date of ratification and Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus and the date that occured. Maybe I should be typing this sentiment under the discussion of the NYT article that discusses how the humanities need to "justify" their value. Mainly, I want to point out that all of us who are trying to get into grad school right now, who are measuring ourselves against other "hypothetical" applicants and nit-picking through our personal statement which we now find totally embarrassing (me included), we all have been lucky enough to get a college education already. I just wanted to write this little thought about my experience the innocuous facts that we all have swimming around in our brains are pretty earth-shattering to other people, who haven't had the luxury of college yet. So, just to relax, if you're feeling like you're not worth anything based on a huge stack of rejections, you might look for a volunteer opportunity like this where you are, because it's great to share the wealth of our educations instead of just feeling bad.

I'm wondering if anyone has a favorite resource book on doing literary research that they've found particularly helpful. Also, if people wanted to share their particular approaches that would be great. Personally, I tend to start with an anthology, either a volume of anthology on the field of literary theory I like, such as narrative theory, rhetoric or structuralists or the essays in the back of a Norton's edition of a literary work, e.g. Norton's critical reader on The Scarlet Letter. When I find something that interests me and seems to apply particularly well to primary literary work I follow up on the bibligraphical references, searching for theory in that vein that was already written about that novel using that theoretical approach, or if I start with an essay about a novel in particular, I follow the bibligraphic references back to the broader sub field of theory, like narrative theory, and try and find a link to a theorist I am familiar with and tend to like. Any tips for focussing this process or making sure it's done more thoroughly?

Well, BU results seem to be trickling in. Several MA acceptances are posted, but two seem to be PhD offers in disguise (i.e., MA funding with a "guarantee" of a PhD spot if you make "steady progress" toward the degree). This sounds like budget problems. I know Elie Weisel and his wife lost 15 million to Bernie Madoff. I have to think there were other big spenders among BU associated foundations who took a big big hit this year, too. So sad. Anyway, if you're in at BU and would like to share info, please post. I'm particularly curious if BU is offering you MA funding, if you apply elsewhere after your MA and get accepted will they let you go, since they aren't really guaranteeing you a contract?

Rinneron, Nice job on the name change! Boston College seems to have quite a good Irish Lit department too. I suppose that is because both NYU and BC are near an "Irish Riviera" i.e., Rockaway Beach in Queens NY and Boston's South Shore.

On the initial post, there is a "button" called Edit. It should bring up your original post and allow you to make changes. I've seen Irish Lit referred to as "post-colonial" as well.

Which one?

On the bright side, a year off may not be so bad...

Let's be honest, UVA is an AMAZING English Dept., but could I ever learn to talk slow enough to live in Charlottesville? Probably not.

Sometimes I wish I had been raised religious, just so I could be disfellowshipped. Lyonnes, it is a truly a great honor, even to come close. Congrats to you