asleepawake

CAN JUST BE DONE OR SOMETHING

Winter break is over or almost over, depending on your school. E-mail, e-mail, e-mail.

I used Interfolio. It's great, but a few of my schools did not accept letters from Interfolio. However, I suspect that if your letter writer has passed, even these schools would probably make an exception for that one letter. Is there anyone else you can ask? I think that you should absolutely speak with other faculty members who know him and his current health situation better before you go about asking him. Think of it this way: Do you really want to ask a person who has been given 3-6 months to live, or a person who may be undergoing chemo or other overwhelming medical treatments, to spend several hours writing a letter about a student they once had? Hopefully not, unless you know that person to take great joy in helping students succeed via letter writing. But you don't know if the situation is that dire, right? Find out without having to ask him. Find a way to find out, or, better yet, go with another letter writer if you have one.

For the morbid, here's an outdated list of average GRE scores (verbal only, old format) of admitted students. It helps to remember averages mean a number of students have lower (and of course, higher) scores, so there's really no purpose to this list besides make you better worse/better/whatever.

Wait, actually, I think Rochester had me upload transcripts to the website.

I sent mine to the address listed in the following:

Yeah, I didn't say any of that. I said go look at some recent hires. That doesn't mean I said "Oh, look, they hired someone from Harvard. Therefore Harvard got them the job." You've applied some fundamental logic to a statement I didnt give. Instead, you want to look for patterns. Don't just look at 1 hire, look at the whole lot for a bunch of research universities. Your pedigree doesn't determine what job you will get, but it does influence the institutions that you can expect to apply to with a reasonable chance of hire. You can also look at the recent graduate outcomes for some of your phd programs. I applied to a wide range of schools, and these lists look very different. Some schools sent a bunch of people to R1 schools and a few Ivies, others send people to mostly community colleges with a few liberal arts colleges thrown in.

I won't go so far as DontHate, but take a look at the recent hires at your favorite university...

I attend one of these supposedly horridly less-than programs beet-nik has mentioned. I've gotten an excellent education here. I've been fully funded for 3 years. I probably won't get into my top schools, but I don't think that my current school will be the reason. My institution's name may not be helping me, but I don't feel that it's completely hindered me either. A lot of people from my program have gone on to various PhDs (and, of course, a lot of people haven't). I don't know of anyone going on to a top-10 (though I'm only thinking of people who've graduated over the past 5 years or so).

This is increasingly not true of law school. The market is over-saturated, just like the PhD market: Only slightly over half of law school grads are getting decent, long-term jobs in the field, and almost all are leaving with extensive debt.

Write off

Wow, yeah, none of my schools asked for any more than 3 eggs.

I want to read read read!

I just changed my forum timezone to see if it would let me up vote that. It is too smart for me. It knows.

I had a dream that I was rejected from everywhere and I was worried about whether I should tell the gradcafe or if I should just disappear and never post again. Then I was at a dinosaur zoo so idk.

None of anyone's schools notify this early. The very earliest notifications are still 2-3 weeks away. We just have to ride out the rest of the rest of the month.

I'm not sure if we're still partially protected by a generational gap, or if I'm just a weirdo, but my general impulse is to google everything and everyone. Googling is incredibly fast. If you're good with the internet, you can find virtually anything in seconds. Am I just extra-curious? It seems to me the googling is about fast information, but you should also be careful with what you find. I would just assume somebody is googling you. If not the adcoms, everybody else. Your profile picture should be appropriate for all audiences. Make everything else private, if only because it is personal and you may soon have students who, I promise, will be googling you. Prepare, also, for the fact that you will be adding peers and maybe professors on Facebook. Some departments use social media extensively.

There are lots of legitimate problems with the modern University, but this yearning-for-the-days-of-yore sentimentalism is getting old. The University has NEVER been a beautiful haven of the mind that was open to all. Regardless, it can be rough, and you should know that before getting into it.

A lot of people come to grad school and don't finish. A lot of people end up not liking it or getting overwhelmed with it. I think the MA is a good idea so that you can get an idea of whether or not you are willing to give up your job for it. After the MA, you can consider applying to PhD programs if you're still interested, or you could begin to teach comp classes at your current institution. I've heard a lot of people say "Don't get your PhD in the humanities unless you cannot imagine yourself doing anything else." This has always struck me as a weirdly privileged sentiment: Of course I can imagine myself doing all kinds of things. But this is my first choice. You have to decide if a life of uncertainty is worth giving up a stable job for.

Awesome! Yours is more organized than mine

Yeah, it's been fewer than 24 hours since I finished and I feel no closer to any results. I guess I should finish my thesis or plan for the Spring or something. Or I could apply to more schools....

My applications are DONE. donedonedonedonedone. Now... what do I do?

I have to agree with Swagato. I see from your other posts that you are an international student. If you don't get in this year (though I hope you do!), spend the next year improving your written English. A lot can be done with language in a year. Also, I don't think anyone was offended by your post. I'm not sure where you are seeing that.

Does Fordham seriously say 5 to 15 pages, or am I looking in the wrong place? Of course I'll submit 15, but 5!?

Thank you! I couldn't log in to the site, but I realized I just forgot that I changed my password. Duh. It looks like the application is okay, including "marked complete by the applicant." I just never got the final e-mail. Relief!