asleepawake

Answer: No to everything from the 8ball! What to do? LOL, I didn't realize I posted this in the 2014 thread. Too many tabs open!

I am so terrible at making decisions! Can I attend two PhD programs? James Franco does it.

Everyone said stupid things in 2012. It was a different time, a whole different era. I was young and free and foolish and we had the whole world ahead of us! Marijuana also wasn't a potent then. How is up voting and down voting trolling?

First of all, my comment is a year old, and if you actually read my other posts you would see that I came around to the logic of other perspective. That post--which I certainly wrote, but which I no longer agree with--was me passing on the advice I received in a PhD-application workshop offered by a current PhD student at U of Iowa. She gave lots of good advice, and I believed most of it, but clearly she wasn't right on everything. Such is life. Oh, if you haven't heard of it, it doesn't exist! It clearly isn't as widespread as I was lead to believe last year, but it absolutely does happen. It may happen when someone cannot pass their comps or put together a dissertation, and it probably only happens at certain schools.

Aww, you are loved in return. I applied quite widely and I think this is key, especially when you have these kinds of things working against you in the first place. You can totally do it! Of course it's good to have the numbers behind you, but we're all got what we've got, so I think it's beneficial to focus on what you can still change. Your old grades are not among those things, unfortunately. A commuter school is is basically a lower-ranked regional or state University that caters mostly to students who commute to campus. They often offer a lot of night classes and have students who skew older than your average state University. There aren't a lot of dorms and greek life barely exists, and they aren't exactly known for their academic rigor. That said, I liked my school, but at the time I did not have graduate school in mind. The school offers a limited number of graduate degrees, and has a decent law-school, and actually includes one particularly strong department (not English!), but it doesn't look impressive on transcripts.

I mean, feel free to complain about it on gradcafe as much as you want But I wouldn't say it to adcoms. Your GPA is great. My undergrad GPA was 3.16 and it was even lower in undergrad English classes. These grades came from an unimpressive commuter school, too. Granted, I have an MA and it's been a while since I got that GPA, but I have 4 offers and 2 wait lists. Lots of people with higher stats than mine were rejected from these schools. Fit/writing sample/SOP/LORs/etc are more important than GPA and GREs. Then again, who knows? Maybe if I had a 4.0 I would have even more offers, or I wouldn't have been shut out from the top schools that I applied to.

No. Your GPA is very good. Never speak of this again. Nothing is more annoying than someone who assumes any time they earn a less-than-perfect grade that it is the result of a rogue professor who is just out to sabotage them. Even if it's true. Your GPA is great (certainly good enough for top programs if you other materials are also good enough) and you don't need to make excuses for it. Everyone should have a few blips.

Everybody should apply for FASFA whether you end up taking out the loans or not. There are often graduate grants offered, though this may depend on your school.

I've found hotpads.com to be a really great site for finding rentals - it has a really fantastic mapping system.

That's nice if you have the opportunity, but there are plenty of inspiring, brilliant people to work with--who ultimately might be more helpful than a super-busy superstar--in all types of schools. You just have to find them, and once you get to your institution you can figure out who they are.

Then they're not the "best schools" for the MA. Seriously though, choosing to take on some debt isn't the end of the world (then again, neither is waiting a year and re-applying to avoid it). I was fully funded in my MA and yet I took out quite a few loans anyway (over 3 years) to support a fairly normal lifestyle that I couldn't have afforded otherwise. It was probably a mistake. Most MA stipends are quite low, especially if you live somewhere with a high cost of living. I should have just had roommates. I'm not taking on any more debt for the PhD, and I'm even going to try to make a dent in the loans while I get my PhD (ha!). I would suggest getting some teaching experience under your belt even if you cannot get a GTA position. Does your school have a writing center? Work there. You can also teach online--I did this for one semester for some extra money and experience. There are lots of positions teaching to students abroad or tutoring English learners available online with only a BA required. Not all PhD programs will care, but a bit of experience can making it easier if you have to write a teaching statement or if a school doesn't fund all students. Good luck, whatever you decide.

Flavored Vodka is for sissies and pregnant women.

Any liquor under 80 proof is a beer, and beers are pointless.

Whoa. He reads Plato, too.

True, but please don't write off the entire South without checking out specific cities first! We have great weather, and plenty of places in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee are awesome. Even red states are still like 40-something percent blue!

LOL Why did I just watch the entire thing

There is also a PhD acceptance listed as "Ole Miss" from March 15th.

I think that animal studies has immense staying power. That animal studies is even controversial as a thing to study is blowing my mind. It has practical applications to our culture, to our relationships with the beings things that live on this Earth, with what we eat and how that food is produced, with the object of suffering, with the beings we call "man's best friend," with how we complete scientific research, with our livestock and companion animals and nuisance animals, etc. I think that views on these things are shifting not just in academic circles, but in modern culture as a whole, and that the study of these shifting views is relevant in the long term.

I can't prove it to you; you need to prove it to yourself by familiarizing yourself with the works that exist in this field. A few of us listed them some pages back.

Gathered some people articulating the field's importance for you, Fishbucket, so you don't have to do any more reading than the bare minimum.

Please open up a book or an article and actually read some of this stuff because you're making a fool of yourself.

Convincing you that it is worth studying is not exactly our job. In order to find out if something is worth pursuing, it's your job to actually read what has been written in the field before you decide. You sound an awful lot like the folks who just don't get literary study generally and who say things like "you're reading too much into stories; they are just stories." It's really hard to begin explaining the value of theory to that person, and since you're not a student in our classes we don't feel the need to explicitly explain to you why the field is worthwhile, even though a number of good reasons have been given on this board already. How do you claim knowledge of the motives of people involved in these fields when you aren't even familiar with the fields in the first place? I'd have been drawn to animal studies whether it was old hat or whether it didn't exist yet... I certainly didn't jump at it for "novelty," and I don't know of anyone else who has gone into any field for that reason, though I'm sure a few people have (it is true, though, that it is nice to be a field that is developing). If you do your work because it is "hot," it probably will not be very good work. You are simultaneously accusing animal studies and etc. folk of seeking "novelty" but then also of just ripping off Heidegger. What are you even talking about?

I think there are qualitative ways to talk about things like game theory, though. As these kinds of things enter English, they also grow and change.

Humans write literature, and sometimes that literature is about insects.

In addition to those that others have suggested, you should of course read Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am and John Berger's About Looking. You should also be familiar with the likes of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. There was also an animal studies issue of PMLA a few years back that is worth getting your hands on. Well, yes. This is one of the most basic concerns of animal studies and posthumanism in general (the acknowledgement that human experience is not the experience but that is is nonetheless everywhere). It's not as if animal studies/posthumanism/etc haven't grappled with this problem or as if scholars live in fantasy-land where they imagine that they can view the world as a pea. In terms of what will be "hot" soon, I'd like to see more network theory and game theory sorts of things popping up. There were a few people at my recent visit to Buffalo talking about literature and mathematics.