ComeBackZinc

Is there any system of human advancement where personal relationships don't make some sort of an impact? You're right to say that the truly unqualified aren't going to be getting into a great program simply because one professor pulls for one applicant. What certainly is true is that networks of friendly scholars can help to influence who gets one of very few spots, without malice or any attempt to "cheat." This is especially true in a context where you are often sorting essentially meaningless distinctions. As much as we'd all like to believe that our applications reveal us to be perfectly unique snowflakes who are in possession of objective strengths, the reality is that there are tons of students with great grades, great GREs, glowing letters of rec, and very strong SOPs and writing samples. If you're a prof who has to recommend a small handful of applicants from hundreds of applications, and you have a professor who you know and trust say, "hey, this student of mine is brilliant," that is information you're likely to see as valuable. It's not an attempt to subvert the process or to screw anyone. But it certainly is an influence that many applicants would see as external to what they believe they should be evaluated on. If these kinds of personal connections were out-and-out corrupt, they wouldn't continue. It's precisely because they lie in a murky area between natural and helpful on one hand and potentially unfair on the other that they persist. It's like the constant discussion of fit. A professor might take a colleague's recommendation seriously because he or she feels that the colleague has provided reason to believe that the prospective student would be a good fit. So where does legitimate consideration of fit end and illegitimate consideration of personal connections begin? There's no bright line. This is also related to, but separate from, perceptions of individual colleges, their prestige, and the weight they are given in the selection process. In each case, I find that people are very quick to dismiss them as having any impact at all. That's a mistake, I think. What I do believe is that you should only worry about the elements of your application that you control. If you don't think your recommenders can give you an edge, you shouldn't sit around worrying about it, any more than you should worry about the prestige of your undergrad institution. But to pretend that those things aren't important because it is uncomfortable if they are isn't a useful way to think. It's impossible to say to what degree these things impact who ultimately gets in. But I do think that people who blanket deny that they matter at all-- often extrapolating from personal experience, even though they are ignorant of whether these connections helped them themselves-- aren't being productive. In a process where some super-competitive programs let in as few as 8 new students, one or two students who had an edge thanks to who their professors know makes a big difference. Just bear in mind three rules that are true regardless of what facet of this process you're talking about: 1. This process is not fair. It does not represent a meritocracy. Change and circumstance affect outcomes. 2. The process exists to serve the needs of the departments, not the needs of the applicants. 3. You will never be in perfect control of the outcome of your own applications. So just do your best and try to remain as emotionally detached as you can.

I think timeframe is really important here. If this was mid-May, I would be worried. But you're fine.

Talk to faculty at your present institution. Ask them for advice on how best to handle this. I agree that if you're going to do it, you should read the CGS council statement and try your best to do so today. Above all else be diplomatic and polite.

All my hopes, you guys.

Here we are showing a little of our school spirit.

Here's my little buddy!

Oh, it's good to do a couple things, for sure. Just recognize that there are sharply diminishing returns. A committee or two, a position or two, that's fine. But a long list of service positions on your CV isn't going to do anything more for you than one or two. And that time has to come from somewhere, and you need to be publishing. Publications is the first round of cuts.

Just remember: some people in grad school want to be the Platonic ideal of a grad student; some people want to go on to become professors. You'll be surprised how many of the former there are. Don't join any committees or groups or whatever unless a) you really genuinely want to do them for their own sake or you can articulate a clear way in which they advance your professional academic career.

All kidding aside, I'm someone who is always arguing that you have to force yourself not to be all grad school, all the time. (In part, that's an argument against joining every academic group and committee, which I think is a mistake.) I know some people are into their fitness classes, and we have groups devoted to gaming and such. I personally need my free time to remain unstructured so that I don't have regular things on the schedule outside of school, but I'm sure some people do those sorts of things. One question for people at schools is how much crossover there is between different departments and disciplines. In my experience, at most schools, not very much at all.

Yeah, I'd feel very comfortable about UTs track record! I think it's a good example of how general perceptions and anecdotes can corroborate the numbers.

Re: placement rates, check this out http://chronicle.com/article/An-Open-Letter-From-a-Director/64882/ I've talked about placement rates before, but as I've read more and more stuff like this (and there's a lot in the Chronicle to be read) I'm more skeptical about talking about them. The problem is that no two programs have consistent methodologies for determining their placement rates. I'm not saying don't look at them, just try to take them with a grain of salt.

PhD comps this summer. 24 hour exam, July 30th-31st, 7-day exam the following week.

Bear in mind that Berkely's rhet program is very different from rhet/comp programs. I would personally say that while I'm not sure that you would want to take a philosophy focus into a rhet/comp program, you can certainly take a theoretical focus. It helps if you're from certain programs that have a strong theory contingent, like St. Louis or Purdue.

Email Jill Quirk and give her the situation. griff@purdue.edu She's the graduate studies assistant. She's awesome.

I've made this point in years past, but I saw someone express this kind of anxiety recently, so it bears repeating: it's perfectly natural and quite common to not feel happy or excited after you decide what school to choose. When I heard back from the program I'm attending, I knew I should feel ecstatic. It was my top choice, by a wide margin. I had worked to get into grad for ages. I also had the daily experience of reading people here who hadn't gotten in to the schools they wanted or anywhere, sometimes. I expected to feel fantastic. And then I just... didn't. I felt guilty for not feeling anything. Why didn't I feel happier? But when I shared that feeling here and with other people I knew, I found it was quite common. I think there's a variety of reasons for that. First, there's just the mental and emotional drain of the process. You spend all this time working, and then all this time stressing, whether it's about getting in or choosing your school, and then it just... stops. Which might make you feel really happy, or might just make you feel a little numb or exhausted. Second, no program can ever be as exciting as the promise and potential of any program. It felt good to know where I was going. But before you choose, there's limitless potential. You could end up anywhere, which is exciting and invigorating. No matter how happy you are with your choice, it can't contain all the potential of all the schools you applied to. Finally, I find that unless they get into all or almost all of the departments to which they apply, many people can feel somehow unsatisfied or rejected even if they get into their #1 choice or a school that they are very happy to attend. I know I've talked to different people who have said, "I would have chosen the program I'm in even if I got into those other schools... so why does the rejection hurt so bad? Why do I wish I had gotten in so much?" If you don't feel this way, all the better. But if you aren't feeling as good as you thought you would, don't sweat it, and don't feel guilty. It's natural and happens to a lot of people.

First, I would recommend The Rhetoric of Rhetoric by Wayne Booth. It's more of a high-atmosphere global view, but it really helps to situate rhetoric's purpose and to examine some of the consistent concerns of the field. Second, to identify more of the subject matter and terminology, I really love Rhetoric in the European Tradition by Thomas Conley. It's accessible and short, but also comprehensive. It really cuts through a lot of minutiae to give you a great sense of how European rhetoric developed and evolved. Finally, you should read Aristotle's Rhetoric (though you surely will in your program) because as much as the field has evolved and as good as it is that people are looking earlier than Aristotle now for rhetorical history, his book remains a touchstone, and does as good a job of any as defining and explaining those key terms you're interested in. Incidentally, a syllogism is a form from deductive logic where a certain set of givens lead necessarily to a particular conclusion. Like, all bears are brown; John is a bear; therefore John is brown. An enthymeme is often defined as a probabilistic syllogism; the conclusions are only likely to proceed from the assumptions. Many people have drawn a broader analogy about the difference between logic and rhetoric from this distinction. Logic is a language of certitude that typically requires more information than we ever enjoy in real life; rhetoric is a language of probability which is designed to be practically useful in real-life contexts.

Congrats to all three of you! Can't wait to read your work.

Such a cool program.

In fact, some rhet/comp programs are housed inside of Comm departments. I think that's true of MSU, and while at URI they have a separate Writing & Rhetoric department, that department is moving to the Harrington School of Communication. It's an interdisciplinary field; our most recent hire came up through informatics and library science. You'll be fine!

They get lots of competitive candidates; for many people, those are their top programs. Look, wait lists happen, and some people take forever to notify schools that they won't be attending, and so the schools have to wait to notify other candidates. The reality is that this process exists to serve the departments and not the applicants. They have the power, and so they'll use the process to their own ends. That's life.

Right, and I should say that the blame doesn't lie with the departments alone. The administrations at their schools often make it impossible to teach the number of classes they're mandated to without relying heavily on TA labor.

It has to be pointed out that people have been predicting a recovery in the tenure track job market for several decades, and that has never happened.

The latest figures that I've seen from Harvard (for an admittedly loose definition of a top program) had them with a 67% academic job placement rate over a five-year period, three years after completion of the program. How they define academic, exactly, I'm unaware. The overall employed rate among that same group was 81%, so you had an additional 14% of the people in that time frame were employed but outside of academia. I have heard that they have had an upswing in recent years, and that data is from the middle of the 2000s, so take this with a grain of salt. One thing about this is you need to balance the desire for recent information with a large enough sample for the numbers to be meaningful. You can't overextrapolate from one particularly bad or good year. Here's a good, typically depressing article from a couple years ago: http://chronicle.com/article/An-Open-Letter-From-a-Director/64882/ Among other things, it makes the good point that you can't simply focus on placement; you have to look at time-to-completion and percentage who complete the degree. In other words, if these people and their research is correct, you are more likely to drop out of your PhD program in English than to graduate. So I would argue that time-to-graduate and graduation percentage are just as important, or more important, than placement rate. You have to get the degree first before you worry about a TT job. I would argue that, in addition to universities having to return to a TT-dominant model (which may be a pipe dream at this point), literature departments have to stop taking on so many candidates. They are flooding the market with far more PhDs than job openings, both ensuring that a lot of people are left jobless and also reducing the leverage of those who do get hired. I look at department websites and see so many students in some programs and I'm just agog.

That was my fear as well.

Are you worried about the "academic incest" thing? Some people claim that fear is overblown; some people think it's a genuine and deep problem. I dunno, myself, but I'm sure I would worry. The fear, I take it, is that if you've gotten all three degrees from the same school, you've never been assessed by anyone but a small number of individuals, who might be promoting you out of personal regard and obligation rather than your value as a young scholar. I don't really have an opinion myself, but I've heard it talked about a bunch.