bdon19

To those of you who were accepted, congrats! I am a first year at UNC right now, so feel free to pm me with any questions you may have!

Ditto. I happened to see the grad admissions director in the student union today, meeting with undergraduate students. These are professors who are still teaching both undergrad and grad courses, getting their students through major/minor exams, mentoring students, planning the visitation weekend for students who do get accepted, and doing a whole bunch of other things.. I don't envy them, as I can barely get my work done as is!

Aww, sorry for the false alarm! Well, in any case, word should be coming soon! (I shall chastise the silly rumormongers in the meantime )

I got my admission from UNC around 8 pm (9 pm NC time) last year, so yes, it's possible! Fingers crossed for y'all!

Unfortunately, I only heard this from a friend, who heard it from a faculty member he passed on the staircase today. Other than that, I don't know much at all. I don't even know who's on the committee, minus the admissions director, DGS, and such. Good luck to you though! UNC is a great place to be! Good luck to you, Two Espressos! You've been working so hard at this; I really hope it works out for you!!

Haha mainly I'm just SO EXCITED that we are about to have a new cohort I can't contain myself! AHHHHH! I had so much fan last year on the prospective student visit, I want to make that happen again! And I want to wish good luck to everyone! I know just how crazy I felt last year at this time, and I have survived!

Hey friends! Just wanted to throw out there, I heard rumors today that the adcomm here at UNC is finalizing decisions basically as we speak and will be starting to notify soon! I know I got my e-mail last year at about 8 pm, so keep your eyes out! I am crpssing my fingers for all of you!!

From my experience last year, I think I remembe that my program initially admitted 12 students for both English snd CompLit and then put maybe 10-15 or so more on the waitlist. A number of those waitlists were subsequently admitted, and we ended up with a cohort of 16, slightly larger than the number they were initially throwing around as the target size. Not sure if this helps, esp since I don't know the logic behind doling out acceptances in this way, but I would say maybe 2x the projected cohort is normal, typically done through waitlists

Hi friends! Just checking in to see how things are going after a semester of grad school! I miss the constant excitement of being on here all the time!

Haha, as someone who went through all of this last year at this time, I can remember how awful this all was. Keep in mind, you're almost definitely not going to hear anything for another month (I think my earliest notification was early(ish) February. And you are going to keep getting those "we have received your application" e-mails the entire time and it's going to give you a heart attack each and every time. One school (I think it was Duke) sent me one like every three days for over a month! Good luck to you all! Maybe I will see some of you around my neck of the woods in a few months!

Hey, GradCafe friends! Long time no talk! Just a question for y'all...how are your programs going so far? Personally, I'm loving my classes but am feeling super overwhelmed in terms of workload and even in terms of social interactions. I keep feeling like I'm making an ass of myself and it's kind of awful! So, just wanted to catch up with y'all (look at this little midwestern girl, becoming a true southerner ) and see how the first year in grad school is treating you!

I'm a bit late coming back into the game, but appropriately here I am in NC! I'm just getting settled, meeting the roomies, preparing to start classes next week. It all feels surreal...

This makes me feel the tiniest bit better about my life. At least my boyfriend is only 16 hours away. And currently unemployed (which means I get to eventually try and convince him to find a job and/or MFA program near me, right?!)...

There's no way in hell I could bring everything. The books I could *sort of* bear to part with already fill an entire bookcase in my room. I've got it narrowed down to one box that I absolutely can't live without, a backpack filled with stuff I'm planning on reading on the cross-country road trip, a couple of boxes filled with things I'm likely to need within the next year, and a giant stack of "I can't afford to ship these but really wish I could bring them". Oh, and Saturday is the Newberry Library book fair in Chicago. That's going to set the balance wayyyyyyy off the day before I leave...

I am kind of obsessed with stuff that takes a more "creative"/essayistic approach to scholarship/theory/whatever, and read a lot of it for my senior thesis this past spring. I'd highly suggest David Shields's Reality Hunger, which amalgamates (and bastardizes) quotations in a sort of collage format in order to examine questions about contemporary demands for memoir and other forms of realism over fiction. It's a fast read and really fun. Another essay about the future of the novel that most definitely takes a creative writing approach is Lars Iyer's “A Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestos, or Nude in Your Hot Tub with a Good View of the Abyss.” It's on Post Road Magazine's website and is really a beautiful essay.

I'm preparing to move halfway across the country in just over a week. I have nothing packed, have to make careful decisions regarding which of my precious books get to come with me, and am altogether just not at all ready to leave. On top of everything, I fairly recently got into a serious relationship that is now going to have to continue long-distance for at least a year and is kind of tearing me apart. I'm excited about school, but it still seems so far away that I'm less in the anxious anticipation and more in just the anxious stage! How is everyone else feeling about starting fresh?

The ending WAS very melodramatic, but, for some reason, that is what I LOVED about it. I think it's because I just spent the past term writing my senior thesis about whether or not the novel is "dead," and then there's this amazing novel that uses the 19th-century novel form and brilliantly transposes it onto the twenty-first century. I don't know, it was just kind of refreshing for me, in the way that Victorian novels can be refreshing. And in the way that, at least formalistically, it's not trying to DO anything other than be a novel (unlike something like Eugenides's The Marriage Plot). I haven't read The Corrections yet, but I'd be interested to do so now!

In the time after graduating, I finally got around to reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and am now resisting the urge to specialize in contemporary lit. I've decided, in a final act of young rebellion against the academy, that my summer will mainly consist of me holing myself up in my room with Netflix, catching up on TV that I always was too busy reading to watch. I have all next year to read that theory stuff, anyway.

In response to some of the points brought up by Two Espressos, I want to voice an opinion of mine that I wish I had more clearly formulated and been able to articulate pre-applying to grad school. Recently, I've been working on a project for my English major capstone course that takes up questions about the future of the novel. I have been discovering more and more that my (admittedly amateur) training in creative writing has prepared me to a huge extent to talk about a number of issues related to both the contemporary novel as well as the novel more generally throughout its history that I never would have gotten through my strictly literary education. I had the opportunity to attend the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference a few months ago, and the experiences I've had with people who are active writers has really allowed me to open myself up to looking at literature outside strictly a theoretical or scholarly lens. I never in a thousand years would want to attend an MFA program (nor would my writing be up to par anyway), but learning the kinds of things that an MFA program teaches and participating in writing workshops has really expanded my views on the field of literature more generally.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fiona, I think we've all been rooting for you for so long; I'm so glad you'll be able to go to the school of your dreams!

I second that!

YAY! Oh my gosh, this is so exciting! I can't wait to see you there!

Well, it's official. I just accepted my offer at UNC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO EXCITED!

At one of my visit weekends, a bunch of us were talking about tattoos in general. Then one kid said he once contemplated getting a full sleeve of author portraits. I think I responded snarkily, but really. That is kind of amazingly awesome.