ComeBackZinc

Different conferences have different levels of prestige and competitiveness, it's true, and when you're on the job market no amount of conferences can make up for a lack of publications. But conferences are a huge part of professional and academic development. Presenting at prestigious conferences means a great deal for your career. And more to the point, conferences are fun! They're a chance to meet and interact with people who have the same academic obsessions than you. You get invaluable feedback on your work, and you'll often be inspired in ways that lead to publishable work. Don't sell yourself short, going to your first conference is something to feel proud and happy about.

I'm not a lit person but I think it will be much easier than you think to find scholars who work in those areas.

major PROBLEM above, not program, sorry

Without at all disputing what Swagato or Two Espressos is saying, I'd like to reiterate that you shouldn't look at your SOP like a contract. Departments know that your interests can and will change. (After all, if you knew just what you were going to study... why would you bother to do coursework?) The really compelling part about an SOP is that it allows students to demonstrate that they know what an academic project entails. It's not that you tell them what your dissertation topic is going to be. It's that you frame interests in a way that makes them say, this is a person who will one day be able to come up with an appropriate and marketable dissertation, someone who understands the arc of an academic career. It's a signalling device, and a very important one. That's part of why waxing on about your personal life or passion can be so dangerous. None of this is to dispute the importance of fit. If you are describing projects that have nothing to do with the current faculty of a program, that's a major program. You want to show that, as you develop and grow, you'll be able to develop and grow into fields where you can be adequately prepared by current faculty. Fit and subject area do matter. Just remember that you certainly will be encouraged and expected to explore and discover, and that no one will care if your SOP has little to do with your eventual focus. That ability to play is one of the best things about grad school.

I guess I just have a hard time understanding how someone could feel that 15+ schools are all an appropriate fit in all of the many dimensions that need to be lined up in this process.

I don't have any insider information either way. All I can say is that it's an anonymous internet comment on a public forum. How could you take it seriously? Ask faculty you trust who would know about the program for their private thoughts.

As far as having your BA and MA at the same school, that's no problem for getting into PhD programs, likely. The worry about attending the same school comes when one goes BA-PhD in the same program and then tests the job market, where there is a legitimate fear about your work never having been evaluated by anyone from outside of one department. My question is, why do you want to get another MA? To improve your PhD application? It's very hard to secure funding for MAs, particularly if you're going abroad. It doesn't make much sense to me for you to get another MA, and pay for another MA, just to improve your stock for PhD applications. Or would this be instead of getting your PhD?

Remember, your statement of purpose isn't a contract. They don't expect you to write your dissertation about what you think you'll write your dissertation about now. They know that your academic identity is going to change a ton between now and the time you write your prospectus. What they want to see is that you know what an academic project is, that you can define an area of interest that would be conducive to writing a dissertation and building a career. Don't worry too much about the topic you choose. Focus on demonstrating that you know what academic projects and focuses are like, and on showing that you have an understanding of the arc of an academic career.

Tough question to answer in the abstract. As with most things, it'll depend a great deal on your department, professors, opportunities for professional service, etc. Have you thought about attending a school that has strong programs in both, where you could take classes in each? It's fairly common. There's a lot of hybridity between the two disciplines.

I really loved URI's program. I'll say this: it's quite small. You'll be limited in the number of courses you can take and teach. But they're set up wonderfully for mentorship, with a nice spectrum of faculty at different points in their career paths to help you. You'd get lots of personal attention, and their track record for placing candidates is very strong. Also, the new grad director is one of my favorite professors ever. That said, having such limited options class-wise can be a bummer. At URI, you'd really only have three or four legitimate options for classes to take in a given semester. Something to think about. In rhet/comp, prestige of school matters very little compared to history and quality of the program. I'm sure you can find a hundred different lists for what the big programs are. Just understand that because rhet/comp programs tend to be smaller, you have to be careful that the program won't essentially die out if you have a couple of faculty defections and retirements. For that reason, history and departmental investment is important. Whether it's a concentration or separate department probably matters more to faculty and administrators than to you, although when it comes to funding and institutional autonomy, it likely does matter somewhat. I'm not really sure how that would be expressed in your individual experience though.

I got a BA in English and philosophy from a non-competitive state school. Five years later, I got an MA in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. I will be taking my comprehensive exams in the rhetoric and composition program here at Purdue next month. I am far on the empirical side of rhetoric and composition as a discipline. I have emphasized the importance of empirical investigation in rhet/comp both in terms of learning as much as we can about effective writing and literacy education practices, and because I believe that having those competencies will be important for defending our disciplinary identity in the future. I also emphasized the role that empirical investigation can play in political change and institutional critique. I only applied to a small handful of schools, with Purdue being my clear top choice. I got in because I was a great candidate, and also because my letter writers had good relationships with the faculty at Purdue. There's never any clear lines, there. I would echo Proflorax in advising you to ask schools about whether your MFA and MS work could allow you to apply directly into PhD programs.

There are many reasons that I'm pursuing my degree, most of them the same ones that are shared by the vast majority of people here. The part that would be different and relevant here is that my field, rhetoric and composition, has far better employment numbers than English writ large and because my program specifically has never failed to place a PhD student who pursued on into an academic job. That's nothing resembling certainty. I could easily be the first. I'm not naive about how hard it will be. But we're all weighing the odds, and the reality is that the odds are much better for people in my situation than they are for many others in English graduate school. I would not have gone into a PhD program in literature unless I was in a school like a Berkeley or Harvard. That's just me, though. I take no pleasure in saying any of this.

bump, just in case anybody needs to hear it

Honestly: I am much, much more concerned about the people on here who go into a PhD program having never taken time away from formal education than I am of someone in your shoes. I took 5 years between my BA and my MA, and I'm so glad that I did. I think you'll find it's quite common.

While full year fellowships are common, TAships almost never cover the summer months. Some schools are good about finding summer funding/jobs for grads, some aren't.

I'm sure they work slightly differently from department to department, and it's best to contact individual departments. But the essential effect should always be the same: you don't pay any tuition.

New Criticism. That shit is hot.

I would not send a gift, personally, but rather just a card with a sincere, hand-written (unless your penmanship is terrible) note.

A dizzying array of options.

Four people in my program right now went to Georgetown's MA, and they just love it.

Take a break. Get some distance from academia. Try to make a little money. And if you do decide to pursue this, be totally realistic with yourself about the job market and the financial burden.

Love that book! Reviewed it in fact.

^What Eigen said is very useful clarification. It's worth saying that I don't believe in meritocracy, in general, and in fact I think that the empirical case against the notion that success in life is a product of one's talents or behavior is becoming quite strong. (See, for example, how much stronger the correlation is between your adult net worth and the net worth of your parents than that between your education level and your net worth.) But that's a far broader conversation.

Right. And the fact that I don't think the system is a perfect meritocracy doesn't in any sense mean that I don't think people should feel proud or happy for getting in! Of course, everyone should feel proud and happy when they get into a program. They deserve to. It's just important to maintain a certain critical skepticism about the whole process. I would recommend to anybody to think about what a letter of recommendation is for; I mean, part of the point is to get the opinion of respected faculty on prospective students. Where fair begins and ends, I couldn't tell you.

Oh, and to answer your more specific question: don't ever ask a professor to put the word in for you. If you have a professor whose voice you think will be valuable in your support, ask them to write a letter of recommendation.