ComeBackZinc

The whole Purdue network will be rolling deep at Cs this year, past and present. They don't call us the Vatican for nothing. I look forward to meeting you, whether you decide to come here or not.

I think it's perfectly normal to feel ambivalent when you're on a waitlist, and also when you finally make your decision. It's an emotionally confusing process. Just hold on for a little while longer.

Remember that Purdue releases acceptances in batches over a period of time, including through March, so don't panic if you haven't heard anything yet.

Were you on the listserve for the Great Bedbug Freakout of 2013?

I'm supposed to see IU as a hated rival, but damn if that campus isn't straight-up gorgeous.

That would be a relevant criticism, if this was just coming from me. But it isn't. Read Inside Higher Ed. Read the Chronicle. Read some of the most respected professors and administrators in the field. Read the words of people who have gone through the process and come out of it, both those with a job and those without. Not only are they pessimistic, they are actually more pessimistic and harsh than I am. The numbers are what they are. Your attitude towards them is up to you. I have no interest in convincing someone to change their mind if they have made it up. I am also not interested in making people feel bad about this choice. I made this choice! I get it! I understand it completely. But the way that people freak out when they are told the plain truth about the numbers is not healthy. This is a fact: the large majority of the people who post here will never get a TT job. You can decide what you want to based on that information. Everybody here is a grownup and can make their own decisions. But please, don't deny that reality, or imagine that you will necessarily be the exception. Many people went through this process and thought they were the exception, and they ended up wrong. That's all I'm saying. Don't take it personally. It's just the numbers, that's all.

I can't endorse this post strongly enough. It's your life; it's your decisions. You all have every right to take the chances you want to take and to decide what is in your own best interests. I just hope that you guys never become the ones who are shocked if it doesn't work out, have no backup plan, can't handle it emotionally.... Because that has been so devastating for so many people. If you know yourself and know the odds and are frank with yourself about the possibilities ahead, then whatever decision you make will be the correct one. I don't write any of this to discourage. I write it because so many people write essays saying that no one told them. If you decide to go to grad school, I'm happy for you. Even a little jealous that you get to start at the beginning.

I like that attitude a lot. Control what you can control, but don't be naive about what you can't control.

The idea, as it was explained to me, is so that there isn't any kind of a stigma involved in being on the waitlist. Which I suppose is admirable, although I don't know if it helps that much in real-world terms.

I'm cool with the advice that says to go if you want to go without an expectation of getting a TT job. That's fine by me. Just go with the understanding that you are far more likely not to get a TT job than you are to get one. That's not an insult; that's just the numbers. If you go with your eyes open in that way, great! And enjoy.

Just so you know, Berkeley Rhetoric is a very different animal from most rhet/comp programs. They're far more exclusively theory focused. Not that there isn't a lot of theory in rhet/comp, but the focus is very different, as is the intellectual lineage, and I don't think Berkeley Rhet people do any empirical research.

As is often the case, I think it depends on what we mean by prestige. People get hired from lots and lots of programs. I think it certainly helps to come from a school with a large network in the field when it comes to the job market, but ultimately it's up to you as an individual to do good work.

I get yelled at, when I bring up the job market, so I'll brief: I don't think most people understand how bad it is, even if they are reasonably educated, and I don't think people understand how much worse it has been since 2008, and it was really bad before 2008. It is terribly, terribly bleak, and we're graduating literally thousands of unemployed PhDs in English. If you can think of literally anything else that you'd be happy to do with your life, do that. Flame on.

Year 7! Nice to see that you get that funding.

Michigan State is definitely more prestigious. Not sure about Minnesota. I'm biased, obviously, but I really think that if you don't mind a small program and the limited course offerings that entails, it can be a great opportunity. And they've got a good track record for placement, including a friend of mine who just got a job at his dream program in an R1. (He hasn't gone public about it yet.) Southeastern Rhode Island has its ups and downs. Providence is lovely though. I will say that the area is expensive and $18,000 does not stretch far there.

Hey there, I got my MA at URI's Writing and Rhetoric program. I really loved it, although its small size means you have to be strategic about how you approach the program. I believe that they only accept as many PhD students as they can fund, so you should be in good shape.

There was a day last cycle (I think) that people started calling Red Monday or something like that because a bunch of high-profile schools released a ton of rejections on the same day. It was hard to stomach.

It's still early, you guys, so don't give up hope. I heard back in April.

Ann Arbor is a wonderful place.

I'm close with people in the applied linguistics program here and so I do a lot of work that's sort of a hybrid. And what I love about being in rhet/comp is that nobody every questions it or acts like I'm an outsider. Whenever I speak to friends in ed psych or theoretical linguistics, I feel luckier to get that much freedom.

I am currently revising an article about public writing assessment and analyzing a corpus of second-language writing to assess the correlation between the lexical diversity in student texts and scores on a standardized vocabulary test, in an effort to better understand the relationship between active and passive vocabulary. And prepping for my prospectus defense in a couple weeks.

Yeah .50 time/.75 time is often a legal definition that state schools are required to use. There tend to be a lot of rules tied up with it-- we can never go over .75 time, which is typical, and I think that federal law says that international students can never exceed .50 time on a student visa. So you have to get a bit creative with your teaching - our freshman comp classes 106 and 106i (international designation) are .50 time; our accelerated comp, 108, is .25; working for the writing lab is .25; teaching oral English skills to grad students is .50; etc.

I can't tell you what's best or fair or whatever, but teaching from day one (or after a brief orientation and training, anyway) is far and away more common than not.

Bear in mind that teaching two sections of the same course is worlds easier than teaching two sections of two different courses. It all depends. Here, you start with a 1/1, but our introductory composition class is a 4 credit class and you have to teach every day. After your first year, it really depends on you; there's a ton of different options you can apply for, like teaching business writing or technical communcation, working in the writing lab, teaching or tutoring in the oral English program, applying for many competitive administrative roles... Most everyone tries to get to .75 time, simply because it's much easier to live on that money. But after the first year, how busy you are and what you do to earn your funding is highly variable and largely up to what you apply for and what you're accepted to do. I think 2/1 is probably the most common, but I'm sure it varies a great deal.

Totally depends. Some schools have what are essentially rolling admissions, and send out notices gradually over the course of months, as they don't want to have a waitlist that they fear will stigmatize people who were on it. You could email the DGS or graduate assistant and see if there's an expected date, but you may just have to wait and see.