ComeBackZinc

I made the Dirty Dozen!

I'm afraid I don't know anything about funding details, but I do know a couple people in the Philosophy and Literature program who love it, because of the flexibility they have in choosing classes and directing their own project.

The thing to remember about teaching two courses is that, if you're teaching two sections of the same course and using the same syllabus, it's much, much easier than teaching two separate courses. I've done both, and there's just no comparison. The grading is intimidating when you have twice as many papers, but you learn to manage that. Obviously workload and teaching requirements are very important to consider when making your choices, but I would encourage anyone to not think of a 2-1 load as an unworkable burden.

Boom. Congrats.

If we're lucky. My egalitarianism is not earnest, but rather empirical. To a large degree, I've said the same thing that you're saying: fit is a function of what a department wants, not of what the applicant wants it to be. Where I part ways with you is in your belief that you're disagreeing with the people who believe that this process is largely alchemical or arbitrary. I think, in fact, that you're saying the same thing that they say. You just say it in different language.

My own program is exactly this way. From their perspective, it's pretty simple: they have seven areas of specialization that choose their own cohorts: literature, rhetoric and composition, ESL, linguistics, theory and cultural studies, English education, and creative writing. That's not even including Philosophy and Literature. Each is largely on their own timetable. Trying to coordinate all six, and trying to come up with a unified ranked wait list, would be like herding cats. Informing students as they choose, in a kind of quasi-rolling process, is far easier, and potentially easier on students. (Although not obsessives like us who monitor this message board!)

That should be amended to "probably I'm just drunk. And on a Sunday, to boot." No offense meant, Dorinda, not at all.

We are lucky to have the bounty of your wisdom, oh sage. There is, of course, a more pessimistic take on all of this: everyone's opinion is conditioned by his or her success within the system. Those that got into their favored programs have a romantic view. Those that got into some programs but not the ones they wanted most will have a more critical take. Those who don't get in anywhere are likely to have a negative opinion of the whole process. Dorinda, I don't doubt that close reading is important. And, as I have done consistently, I will support the broad notion that fit is very important. But where your comment misses the mark is in its implication that somehow, you can assure your success through your own close writing. And I just don't think that's true, all for all. Last year my program had a 3% acceptance rate. I'm at the program that I wanted more than any other. I'm happy and successful and fulfilled at school. So I'm the definition of a person who should endorse your version of events, for self-interested reasons. But I just don't think life works that way. I think, instead, that you can take your best swing, position yourself the best way possible, maximize your chances, and hope. The fact of the matter is that you can do everything perfectly in the application process and be rejected. That's just how it is. I devote most of my days to reading education research on literacy. What I'm struck by, over and over again, is the perfectly arbitrary nature of who succeeds as a literate person, who can read and write at a high level. What the research tells us, over and over again, is that success as a reader and writer has very little to do with you and very much to do with chance. Were you raised by literate parents? What was their education level? How often did they read to you as a child? Were there books in the home? How often were you taken to the library? Those things are vastly more important for your literacy than anything that you yourself control. So with most of life. When you do get into grad school in English, you read plenty of theorists who explain patiently that the idea of meritocracy is an illusion. But oddly enough, in this space, a profoundly American, regressive idea endures: that your success is mostly the product of your intelligence and your work ethic. It's about as conservative as it gets, and I don't think it's true. The truth is that you've got to accept the fact that this is all a roll of the dice, do your best, and be prepared to move one, when you have to. But maybe I'm just drunk.

Certainly, not one word about how much you love literature or academics or being a student, gah. And no telling them their business; if you have any language like "Author X, one of the greatest novelists in the history of Burkina Faso," you are wasting space and possibly patience. They know how prominent and important the authors you want to study are.

The only advice I can give, and I know it's inadequate, is to look at other SOPs-- those that people are working on and are asking to have reviewed, and those that have been used successfully in the past-- and have yours looked at by whoever is willing. That doesn't seem to happen much here, but it's very common over at the Livejournal grad community. It can be a slog, particularly because these are such individual, specific documents (applicant and program), but I think after a lot of exposure you do start to get a sense of the rhythms and conventions of the form.

Far sooner than that! The very first thing you hear in most any program is that you don't know what you want or what you're going to study yet. I would echo Imogene: the point is not that you know what you are going to end up researching. The point is that you can demonstrate that you understand what an academic project details. A lot of it is weeding out people who write about how much they love literature, or those who define a completely amorphous subject area, or whose interests are completely out of fashion. A lot of this is signalling: are you an academic? Can you speak and interact like an academic? The general statement "fit is very important" seems right to me, from my outsider's perspective. But I'm not sure that it always means much. Sure, fit is important. But it's fit purely from the standpoint of the people in the departments, not fit as defined by the applicants. Departments build cohorts based on how they perceive their own needs and the needs of their faculty. There's nothing nefarious there; all institutions advance the interests of their members. But when someone looks at a school from the outside and says "I was a perfect fit there, I should have gotten in," he or she is mistaking student fit for department fit. We can (and do) guess and approximate and assume about what's going inside departments, but it's always gonna be somewhat inscrutable. Which is why I always tell people to let go of any conception they have of this process as "fair," before they start. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

Heard around the office-- we got about 600 applications this year, department-wide.

One thing that I want to put out there is that there really isn't any perfect thing to say. That's not at all to discount or undermine the genuine and legitimate frustration you guys are feeling. But I wonder if the reality is just that the situation sucks and no matter how people react, it's still gonna suck. The individual reactions you guys are describing here are really annoying, and I wish people had been smarter in how they react. But there's no ideal way. I was struck, in looking at the results survey an on this board, by how people have expressed completely opposite frustrations with the wording of rejection letters. Some people complain that they are too cold and blunt. Some complain that they are too sugarcoated. I doubt there's any right way. When I got rejected everywhere my first attempt, I avoided seeing those professors for as long as possible. I just couldn't deal with it at the time.

wondershowzen

Plus, because UK universities tend to not have teaching opportunities, your MA years might be the best time to go over there. Not to say that people can't or don't get great jobs out of UK PhD programs, but it is something to think about.

When you talk to administrators or profs about this, one of the most common things they say is that people should just call or email with questions. On the one hand, that's sensible. On the other hand, I was too chicken to do so when I was applying, so....

I think this is actually quite a common practice, although of course they'll never say it. My opinion: if you get in, who cares? Just kick ass when you get there.

So I did a little poking around, and it seems that my prior impressions were right. First, although the DGS approves all the candidates, students are chosen by the faculty of the different specializations. And they are largely on their own timetables. So you can't assume that you're out just because some students were already admitted and you haven't heard. Also, the admissions are in a sense rolling, just because of the size of the program and the number of applications. They're still choosing; they still have both acceptances and rejections to send. Until they've come out and told you, you can't assume anything. Which I acknowledge can be kind of frustrating. But don't give up hope. It's still fairly early in this process.

Here, it's not like this is a secret or anything. Spoilered to spare people who don't care.

Don't think it's online yet, but I'll PM it to you.

Get this story I heard from a prof (not rhet/comp) who's about as big as it gets in his subfield. He presented a research question and preliminary data at a major conference. He later learned that his research had been stolen, almost word for word, by another well-known scholar in the field. How did he find out? Because he was asked to do peer review on the proposed article. Apparently he just called the guy and said, you should reconsider trying to publish this, and we'll leave it at that. But can you imagine if it happened to someone without his level of institutional authority? Scary.

Here's exactly what you do. Bust in on the admit committee unannounced, preferably with a secretary trying to hold you back. Grab the grad director by the lapels and say "Listen, you pencil-pushing apparatchik. I'm the greatest scholar in the history of the English language. I want admission, I want funding, I want a research grant on top of that, and I want them now. I'll take my own office and free parking, to boot!" I'm told that works.

My first year as an MA student, I was unfunded. Had to take out loans, which sucks, and I'll be paying them forever. But my second year I was able to get funding. I believe the same thing happened to the next MA candidate (writing and rhet typically only has one at a time), but I don't want to act as if that's a given. So for an MA, it may be worth it. My advice on PhD programs is always not to go unless you get funded. I am unaware of any rhet/comp PhDs that have been unfunded, ribeth, for whatever that's worth. I'm afraid that the whole state of Rhode Island is in a severe fiscal crisis. It was neck and neck with Michigan for highest unemployment for awhile there.

Ah, well. Rhet/comp has nothing to do with the conference, beyond some of the presenters. The division between English and Writing is... wide. Separate buildings, separate funding, separate meetings, everything.

When I applied to PhD programs, the way they went to bat for me, and the enthusiasm and commitment they showed, was really humbling. I'll be seeing them in a couple weeks at C's.