koolherc

anyone hear from 'em?

any more Berkeley Rhetoricians? edit: nvm, just logged onto the website and saw my status. win some lose some

I am proud to say I have never entered that thread boo to self-destructive attitudes

I'll forward this to the adcom committee as an additional LOR. thanks! edit, to all/thread: by the way, concerning the matter of trolls, i definitely have been spurred to post when I read a lot of people asking about a prog that I have heard +/- about, so I wouldn't assume that such a correlation is indicative of foul play.

visit while its cloudy/deary/cold. It'll give you a realistic sense of the climate.

I'm not really following to this convo, but I just wanna say that Strier is an excellent prof. Really nice guy, very open intellectually, and supportive. Also has a boyish excitement about his field, which is always great. That is all.

yeah, mechanics wasn't the right term. i just mean quality of argument and structure and all that. I've written excellent papers that I don't really care about because I constructed great arguments and offered excellent evidence. Certain programs told me to send that paper rather than the more "relevant" one that is shorter and less subtle. then again, I was applying to interdisciplinary programs.

^dope screenname, blinguistics.

DON'T DO IT.

wow that sucks. i'll hope for you that such a stupid requirement doesn't keep you out of the programs you want. it makes me mad, actually. good luck!

i think it depends. i've emailed programs about this---what's more important to you guys? appropriateness of topic or writing mechanics and ability? I've gotten different responses from diff programs and have tailored my writing samples accordingly. You should do the same.

Great points made throught this thread. I'll respond to a couple and also add a point or two: Can't be said enough. I've been rejected from "less prestigious" programs and accepted with tons of money into "very prestigious" ones. It's all about fit. You need to get to know your programs and their styles and who's a powerful/upandcoming/onthedownslope profs way before applying. I originally had a list of about 30 programs that I was researching back in the spring and summer. By the late summer, it was a list of 11. Weeks into the application season, I was still cutting 5 more and added a different 1 at the last second as I learned more about what was what. I also had less than great numbers---3.3 ugrad gpa (2.7 in my first two years) and 3.7 MA gpa; GRE scores that were all over the place (I tested 3 times, and got a 4.5 on the writing the 3rd time and a 5.5 the time before that lol...and this is from a person who studied English and then Linguistics). I used a writing sample that I had gotten a B+ for in a graduate class 2 years ago---but I picked it knowing that it was good anyways and showed my ability to meld disciplines (the prof was old and losin it). I think my SOP is probably what did it for me---I read it now and i think it shows a deftness with academic material that I'm utterly unable of matching in speech. Point is, ya never know what your app will hinge on. You just need to try to be as YOURSELF as possible. Try to give them as full and clear a picture of yourself as possible. When we fail to get into programs, I think it's most often because we've failed to depict ourselves, our minds, and our abilities as they truly are. we're all pretty damn impressive humans at this point. try to remember that next time you check out the "Sh*t [normal] people say when you are applying to grad school" thread; there's a reason people can't figure out why you're trying to going back to school YET AGAIN... ---it's 'cause we're freaks!

a whole dominican cake. (i'm vegan)

wouldn't you like to know...

that's excellent. I'd accept you in a second!

lol. Obama counts, too, though.

Dissolution of current hegemonic politico-economic power structures and the people who perpetuate them (in acid*). *dangling word group... or is it?

Start and end a Revolution.

Fascinating construction. You turned "all kinds of tired" into a single lexical item and them modified by both an adv and an adv prep phrase. Innnngteresting...

yeah, there's ageism in the graduate process for sure. public schools tend to be less discriminatory but you also havent mentioned what kind of programs you applied to and what kinds of schools. the GRE may or may not have mattered. not sure how your weight figures in, tbh obviously gender matters, but not race separate from culture

if you're saying that they just re-asked the same info from your transcript, maybe they were concerned about a forgery? maybe not because of you specifically but because of past candidates?

plenty of this kind of stuff happens on the downlow and nothing ever comes of it. we only think of the negative repercussions because those people get caught and or experience negative repercussions. selection bias

how do ya figure? they're paying you to go to school, and often paying extra for you to "work" for them reading things, grading, and talking to students. and there's the plethora of scholarships that merely require that you write some things and further that the very individuals that populate the institution write rec letters for you that are read by other individuals within the same subculture. PhD study is one of the sweetest deals out there, IMO. if the concern is standard of living---there is plenty worse out there. plenty. "middle class" in this country is minimally 40k for a family of 4, and half of the country currently lives below that.* *not intended as a justification for the wealth gap and destructive political policies of the "left" and "right"

I never felt in danger in Durham, at any and all hours. Same with Hyde Park for that matter. A lot of these schools have vicious policies of gentrification that exacerbate poverty and (thus) crime.

!??! I don't see anything on my status page! I want my rejection, too!!