Phil Sparrow

Trust me: adcom members will not be unhappy if they have to read fewer than 35 pages. Show you can sustain a sophisticated, scholarly argument and stop when you get to the end. Don't pad--for any reason. These people are professional readers, and they intensely overworked even without sitting on the admissions committee. They'll sniff out fluffy filler like gangbusters, and they won't appreciate having to slog through it. 15-20 solid pages is far, far better than 15 good pages and 20 pages of fakery, even if it's excellent fakery.

I'm doing it for Santorum alone.

I say this out of a genuine desire to be helpful, not snarky: you really ought to proofread and run a spell check before you send stuff like this.

Yes, if you have meetings with profs scheduled. These professors will be your colleagues in the future. If you find you must go to the visiting weekend, do your best to make a good impression even if you won't be attending the program. Use it as a networking opportunity. And maybe keep mum to the current students about your definite plans NOT to attend. Be as enigmatic as you want, but don't give anyone there a reason to gossip--especially in a negative way--about you.

Rutgers is an amazing program with excellent placement--better than many/most traditional "top 10" programs. (Take a look at most Ivy placements also; they haven't all been great in the last few years.) And, fairly or not, depending on who is reviewing your application, a MAPH may hurt your chances at a good program unless you really, really kill the app dead. (See that professor's post on "overcoming" the MAPH.)

Because this is not necessarily about graduate programs. Beware these kinds of lists (and most kinds).

No, it's not normal. By all means, if you are ready (and your mentors think you are ready), go ahead and submit a paper to a conference. But don't rush publishing. Publications will follow you around for the rest of your life; you don't want to be attached to one you will regret later on, whether it's because it is in a sub-tier journal or it is a subpar example of the work you are (and will be later) capable of producing.

Re: prestige factor. Be aware that the MAPH does not carry the same prestige as the PhD at Chicago. It is sometimes looked down upon by faculty at other programs because of its cash-cowitude and breadth (I've heard faculty grumble, "What the heck is a masters in 'the humanities' anyway?"). [Edit: I'm not suggesting I agree with this attitude! But , for adcoms, prestige follows programs, not schools.] As far as I understand, MAPH can be great, a wonderful resource and degree, if you pull the right strings and work the system well, but it is such a compressed, difficult, and large program that many people are unable to do so. A fellowship or TAship will look nice on your CV, though. It means someone wants to fund you.

Seconding all of the above. Plus, the assumption that Duke will be less intellectually vibrant because of its location is...questionable. If you're looking for interdisciplinarity and inter-institutional work, then honestly anywhere in the Triangle is for you. You get 2-4 schools for the price of one, especially with Duke and Carolina, which have total reciprocity as far as classes, faculty, other student-y things go. (I'm less familiar with how NC State and other area schools work in the system of reciprocal learning, or whatever they call it.) Chicago is obviously an amazing program in a great city, but it is quite isolated from the other area universities, geographically and campus-culturally speaking.

Seriously? Durham/Chapel Hill/Carrboro is full of lots of cute indie people. Just possibly not in the same overwhelming volume as NYC. It also definitely wins for affordable delicious food out of an NC-IL standoff. Listen---Chicago: "da Bears." There is a LOT of that kind of man in Chi. Plenty of CIBs, but also many many many Farleys and Aykroyds.

D'oh. Wrote in the wrong thread. Dang phones.

How difficult the test is really, really depends on the program. Some are very easy; some are quite challenging. Not all are translation exams, and not all are open-dictionary. In my program, different faculty members design and grade different language exams, so the difficulty really depends on the language you are working with, as some of the faculty have created quite onerous tests and others have produced very easy ones. Regardless of difficulty, it is best to focus on a language that will be helpful for your own research, either on the literature or theory side. If you're doing literature of the American southwest, for example, Spanish may be useful because there could be cross-over literatures. If, methodologically, you maintain an abiding interest in psychoanalysis, you would probably be well served learning French. (French is often a safe bet because so much important theory coming out of the 20th century is written in it.) In the long run, you'll be far better off learning a language that is relevant to your work than learning one that will be easier for some department test. Basically, if you work on a language that will be easy for you now but is not particularly useful in the long run, you'll just have to spend time learning and re-learning the pertinent language(s) later on when the stakes are higher and more immediate.

As has been mentioned above, applying to the MA at Penn State is basically the same, for all intents and purposes, as applying to the PhD. Therefore MA apps and PhD apps are on the same timeline; one will Not come out before the other. But, they do tend to stagger their admits. Some years ago I was admitted in January, but they continued to trickle out admits until at least late March, and I think April, that year. I presume they will continue the same pattern this year. Their recruit weekend is usually in late March.

MA programs often notify later than their PhD counterparts. Don't worry if you haven't heard yet!

To echo Sparky, an unfunded degree can also make you a much harder sell on the job market. No teaching experience? No fellowship? These kinds of things, which fund you, are markers of being vetted by at least one institution. I can't imagine a job search committee overlooking a lack of both.

I'm not using any argument. I don't care if you or anyone else goes to grad school; I just think a lot of people are starry-eyed about what it entails. They know about grad applications and the job market, but not often the part in between. And I have not paid close enough attention to anyone's particular posts to single anyone out, so I'm not sure why you thought I was talking to you directly. Chillax. ETA: I think the Guardian article is silly.

Duh. Scholars are poor because Mercury and Cupid pissed off the Fates. So saith Chris Marlowe. A word of caution: I see a lot of people saying, "Well, at least I'll be employed for the next X number of years, and I'll be having fun!" (or some equivalent thereof.) The time of your life? Ah, no. I LOVE what I do. I am so, so, so lucky to do it. It is wonderful to make scholarship my job. I've done other jobs, and the worst days here are better than the best days in anything else. But it's rarely fun, and it's often despairing. I work 12-16 hours a day, seven days a week. I live with my partner, and yet we sometimes go days without seeing each other because I'm working. I feel stupid and worthless 80+% of the time. Dealing with crushing rejection is like brushing my teeth at this point. It's routine. And I'm racking up a fairly successful record, compared to my peers! Many, many people burn out because they didn't go in with their eyes open--not about the job market, but about how horrible graduate school can be even while it is amazing. (And this continues until you get tenure. Woohoo!) It's basically institutionalized hazing. And I say this at a school famous (notorious?) for its lovey-dovey support system, and I have much better funding then most humanities PhD students. So, have at it, you guys! P.S. Sparky, I too have tasted the Kool-Aid. And it is sweet.

Is School A paying for your visit? If so, it is bad form to go visit B on A's dime. A recruit at my program did that a couple of years ago, and managed to earn a poor reputation as a colleague before he even got to grad school (as it turned out, he's now not at my program or our neighbor). If you can, stay an extra day and visit B. But you want to make sure you are respectful of the program you are there for during your visit, especially if they're financing it.

Prestige schmestige. It's all about placement! Prestige don't mean shit if you can't get a good job. (This is not geared toward either program. I have no idea what Cornell's or Rutgers' placement records have been like in recent years.)

UVa has nice funding but it is limited, and they have to be very careful to make sure they don't over-enroll accepted students. Therefore, they tend to waitlist people while waiting for acceptances or declines from their initial small batch of admits, instead of making a large number of acceptances at once and risking that too many of them matriculate. In the past, they've done this with more covert waitlists, but it appears that this year they are letting more waitlisters know, and earlier.

Funny, U. of Chicago has this same reputation of being a deeply competitive, soulcrushing machine that is only ameliorated by the constant presence of alcohol on campus! Everyone I know in grad school there has moved inconveniently far away from Hyde Park just to get some emotional distance from their respective programs. This is NOT me endorsing this viewpoint, but it's a pretty common characterization of the school writ large.

Law apps are intensely competitive as well as crappy--absolutely no doubt about it, I would not want to go through it myself--but the admission rate at Harvard Law (exceptionally competitive) is about 13%. Compare that with top English programs, which are almost always around or under 10% and often closer to 5%. Though! I am told by contacts in more than one adcom that English apps across the board were down to more normal levels this year after 2-3 years of the highest volume the PhD app market has ever seen. Hence admissions are back to normal (5-9% accepted vs. 1-5% for the last few years at the places where I have contacts). Food for thought! Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Half of my acceptances were over weekends a couple of years ago, by phone and email. It most definitely happens.

Even if profs on an admissions committee "vote against" you in admissions, it doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't work with them if you are admitted to the program. As has been widely discussed elsewhere, an adcom or adcom member's support for your application (or lack of support, in some cases) often has less to do with how little they like you than how much they like someone else, how the current spread of students of faculty is arranged, and so forth.

Penn = University of Pennsylvania, and Penn State = The Pennsylvania State University. Just figured I'd clarify before anyone sees that and doesn't notice that it is in reference to Penn *State* and freaks out about Penn notices going out (which does not appear to have happened yet). I'm not trying to sound like a jerk! I just understand that tension runs high around this time of year, and want to help minimize freakoutitude.