ComeBackZinc

Guys, seriously-- I can't tell you about UChicago specifically, but acceptance decisions can be separated by a matter of months....

That's a point I've been trying to make. My situation was very similar. And note that at some schools, later in the process doesn't mean you are a worse candidate, lower priority, or anything of the sort. In my program specifically (as opposed to the whole department), they work very hard on balancing a cohort with different interests, in terms of subject, methodology, tradition.... And the process through which they select different candidates is staggered by individual focus. It just depends. I have a close friend at a very high profile English PhD program (think about as high profile as it gets) who was admitted over a month after the first admit showed up on this board.

Well, I'm clearly in the minority on this-- and I didn't exactly contact profs before applying, myself-- so I'll move on, but I will leave by saying that the bias on a forum like this is always going to be towards what people want to hear.

I guess it just seems to me that a question of equal relevance is "do any of your recommenders have personal or professional relationships with faculty at schools that accepted you?" But perhaps that's a separate issue.

This is the most controversial question, it seems, in discussing applying to grad school online. I'll say this: it's impossible to make a rule about this. A lot of people tend to want to look at their own experience and pronounce that as best practice. (That's a temptation I have to fight myself.) To me, the details are essential. Cold emailing somebody and attempting to ingratiate yourself with them for a slot in a grad program could easily be a disaster. But it's also simply the case: there's no competitive human endeavor where social factors and networking don't play a part. Who you know matters in applying for a job, and it certainly matters in grad school applications writ large. It's not a crude or malicious situation where unqualified people jump the line because they have a personal connection to a prof. It's the simple fact that in a brutally competitive environment, programs are choosing between hundreds of super-qualified applicants. And academia is a small, small world, particularly in some fields. And that isn't less true at the most competitive programs; in fact it's likely most true in those situations. There's plenty of people who get in without making contact; there's plenty of people who will tell you it was key to their success. Just another complicated question in an often obscure and arbitrary process.

Congrats! That's a great program.

But that's just it. None of them think of themselves as not having a chance. They just don't actually have one. Schools like Yale get a lot of applicants who are "believing in the dream" and "following their bliss" or whatever.

+1.

I can only comment on my own program, guys, but with us the decisions were often literally spaced months apart. Individual faculty played a role in selecting candidates, based on their perceived need for new advisees (etc.); some decided quite early in the process, some quite late. We had an admit in ear,y February and an admit in late April, if you can believe it.

I only really know about my own school, Purdue. Here, the first year all funded English grads (including MFAs) teach introductory composition. Our intro class is a different animal than most schools; it's a five day a week class, with scheduled one-on-one conferencing with students every single week. Because it's five days a week we teach a 1/1 yearly load, in contrast to most schools, where grads typically teach a 2/1. Within intro to comp there is a fairly broad range of syllabus approaches, such as composition through literature, popular culture, digital writing, and many others. We don't assist in the teaching but are the instructors of record and have broad leeway within our classes, although we have to choose our textbooks from a list prepared by the department. After the first year, there's more options. You can tutor at the writing lab, teach an upper level business or technical writing class, teach literature, teach a learning community, among others. Obviously, your individual field within English plays a factor in what you get to teach, but there's a fair amount of wiggle room.

Not to say that it's easy to get into these schools (it's incredibly hard) but remember that the more prominent the department, the more frivolous applicants they get. A school like Yale probably gets a ton of people applying who have effectively no chance of getting in.

Just as a point of clarification, it's not true to say that the most prestigious schools employ fewer grad students as TAs. I'm sure there are exceptions where that's true, but the norm is actually that they teach quite a few. For example, about 10 years or so 55% of Harvard's classes were taught by graduate students. That's a majority of all classes. That became something of a black eye for them, and I believe they lowered the number a bit, but a figure that high isn't out of step with the broader reality at Ivies. I do believe that Ivies employ far fewer adjuncts, but I'm not sure.

Well, I can think of a straightforward reason that people get rejected that has nothing to do with discrimination but is nonetheless not the kind of thing grad departments want to disclose: they lost out to other candidates who had more personal sway or networking in their favor. Happens all the time.

Take heart! I didn't hear back from my number one program until early April, but I got in.

I wonder if there isn't some fear of liability-- that is, if they indicate the reason why applicants were rejected, they might provide the fuel for a lawsuit claiming bias or similar.

It's still so early in the process, guys. Don't get discouraged now.

Forgive me if I'm just misreading your post, but rejections and admissions are often released in different waves; it's common for schools to release an initial wave of rejections long before they admit anybody.

*Phil Sparrow

I echo most of what Phil Savage has said above. I'd put it simply like this: when knowledge has to be practical to be worth being made, the project of the university has ended. Knowledge is its own excuse for being.

Right. It's bad news all around. Which is exactly why there's no sense in turning on each other.

Oh, and by the way, most TT rhet/comp professors don't teach anything like 4/4 loads. At both my MA and PhD institutions, the TT/tenured professors teach course schedules just like their tenured lit counterparts. Most don't have to teach lower-level undergraduate courses at all, and some don't. Many do because they love to teach. (Imagine that.) Personally, I find the fact that you treat love for teaching and a desire to teach undergrads as a mark of shame to be both typical and laughable. I am in this to research, but I'm also in it to teach, as anyone who wants to be a professor should.

Well, I'm typically not one to feed trolls. Here's what I'll say. First, none of the graduate classes taught in rhetoric and composition, at either my MA or PhD institutions, are taught by graduate students. Second, I won't speak to the quality and importance of the scholarship being produced in my field; I wouldn't bother. To begin with, many literature people lack the necessary understanding of research methods, statistics, or social sciences to understand these studies. That's no insult. It merely means that they are not the best to judge, just as I wouldn't expect a communications professor to adequately judge scholarship in comparative lit. Also, many people who are major names in rhet/comp, such as Gerald Graff, are also important in literature. Third, I know many rhet/comp people who are teaching at mainstream, high-quality institutions. Yes, they tend to be large public research universities. That happens to be where I want to teach, as I'm interested in research first. But these are major universities, like the University of California system, the University of Michigan, etc. If you think that the prospects are better for the average literature PhD, you're fooling yourself. The job market for literature is not bad. It's terrible. I'd rather have options in public universities than no options at all. And if you think your contempt for community college students isn't a matter of racism and classism, you're fooling yourself. Finally, antagonism towards rhet/comp tends to come from people in lit who are angry and bitter about the slow demise of literature as a field of professional study. I'm sorry about that. At many programs, the existence of rhet/comp, ESL, or similar social scientific departments keeps literature afloat; we provide the funding, and the hiring rates for our PhDs, that keep departments solvent. I wish there was adequate funding and jobs for everyone. I very much hope that the lit job market rebounds. But allowing unhappiness with lit's dire prospects to act as an excuse for ugly, close-minded sentiment is childish, and totally against the elementary credos of the research university. There are many valuable paths to human knowledge. You don't have to understand them all to support their right to exist, and to define excellence in their own way. Literature people attacking rhet/comp are increasingly in the position of people making a loud noise in a small room. The study of literature as a professional occupation might not survive in anything like its current scale. I hope that's not the case, but lashing out at the people who have nothing to do with that status does you no good. Neither does reveling in a conceited impracticality or obscurity.

It's a delicate topic.... The thing is that it's hard to separate the personalities/individual department politics from the competing interests of the two fields. I will say that at both my MA and PhD institutions, things were fine between the grad students. Typically the problems are in the faculty. Other great rhet/comp programs include Michigan State, Illinois, Arizona, Penn State, UNC, Virginia Tech, Syracuse. (No offense to any programs I didn't mention, this is just right off the top of my head.)

A few things from a rhet/comp person. MLA has information on specific subfields, and yes, the job market is significantly better, and has been improving There hasn't been a significant growth in the number of applicants to rhet/comp programs, or significantly more admits, in part out of a concerted effort by programs not to overwhelm the market Part of the reason that there are more jobs in rhet/comp is that administrators believe that our field is more practical than literature. That's not a formulation that I would endorse, and I reject a lot of the assumptions that underlie it, but with many administrators, it's reality. The fundamental dynamic is that some universities consider writing an essential skill, but don't value literature in the same way (I'm sorry to say) Perceived antagonism between rhet/comp and literature is often overblown Be aware that composition, writing, rhetoric, and various formulations of same are not always housed within English, and some which once were no longer are Absolutely do not attend graduate school unless you are funded It's true that rhet/comp programs get many fewer applicants than major lit departments. But rhet/comp programs also tend to get far fewer frivolous/unqualified applicants. As the field is small, and not very much in the public eye, people who do apply tend to be serious applicants with serious applications There are no guarantees, in any field, for any student. As a general rule, "don't get your PhD" seems very sensible. I could very well end up being that lawn mowing PhD Just as one data point, my department has never had a PhD who attempted to work in a tenure-track job and failed to get one, in over 30 years of awarding the degree

Totally depends on the school. In my department, admissions go out over a period of months. In part this is because they are selecting people who have different research interests; they need to build a new cohort that has the correct range.