asleepawake

Trying to visit an Ivy that you haven't been accepted to isn't a good idea. You can certainly look around campus, but the faculty members are way too busy to meet with the number of applicants who request a meeting. It would almost always be a waste of their time, since, statistically speaking, said student probably isn't going to be accepted anyway. From your perspective, you might feel more confident in your chances of being accepted, so it might be worth poking around as long as you don't bother anybody. Maybe talk to a student - they'll be less jaded and your interactions can't hurt your application!

I'm a little bit of an oddball as I started out applying to MFA programs, only to decide switch to the MA Lit program at my school after the first year. Perhaps it is because of my experiences, but I can't imagine going straight into a PHD program from my BA. I know that some people do a lot of research as undergrads, but I didn't, and when I showed up at grad school I had no idea what kind of work I would eventually want to do (Again, I was dead-set on writing fiction, so things do change). Getting the MA separate from the PhD allows you too avoid too much academic incest - I don't want to only learn from one group of faculty, and I'm not convinced that it would benefit anyone to do so. You don't mention your research at all. Getting an MA is a good place to not only see if you can "handle" grad school, but also to figure out what subfield you're interested in and what exactly you want to research. There are plenty of funded MA programs - you just have to dig. I am fully funded. Paying for an advanced degree in the humanities is a BAD idea unless you are independently wealthy.

I, too, would really like to avoid taking the Lit GRE, but I'm not sure it's possible. My research interests are so far outside of the canon that spending all of the time to study for this test only to end up with a mediocre score seems counterproductive... to the say the least. While I can see the benefit of the test for some people, I just don't believe that every literary scholar needs to be overly concerned with the traditional canon. Ideally, I'd like to attend a program that agrees with me on this. I guess I'm opposed to standardized testing in the first place, but there could at least be multiple versions of the test for those with different concentrations.