HunkyDory

Cool story, bro. I'm curious, which professor? And I don't get why you're being so outrageously hostile.

I mean, I'm more than willing to be helpful and answer questions that people might have. I'm still more than willing to do that. But I won't put up with entitled people who make snide/passive-aggressive statements about common sense. I'm glad what I said was helpful. It's a shame you're not interested in history of the book--I know that that's Stallybrass's specialty...and that man is insanely brilliant. His story is one of my favorites too. He worked as a mortician for years, and is an autodidact...he would just sit in the morgue all night for years reading nonstop. And I'm interested in Contemporary/Digital Poetics myself.

Wow, you seem like quite the asshole. Penn's strongest areas are medieval/renaissance lit, Modernism, and contemporary poetry. They used to have Stuart Curran running Milton and Romantic Poetry (and his specialty was female Romantic poets), although he left in 2008. Since then there's been a bit of a gap in that area of the department, mostly because Curran was so outstanding that nobody could replace him. They've got Lesser running Milton now, but he's a fairly young guy. Because of this, if your research interests are outside of these areas, you've got a drastically reduced chance of getting in...I mean, it's pretty much a "fit" issue here, and you probably weren't applying if you were outside of this area. They'll usually take a gender studies person and race/postcolonialism person, both more often than not working in the 20th century forward. For contemporary stuff (and especially poetry) they look for much more unique research interests. There's a current PhD who got in with interests in recordings and methods of sound production--an issue that's very salient to contemporary poetics that a lot of the faculty has written on to some extent--but an area which less work is being done in. Poetry-wise, they're the opposite of the canonical Yale/Harvard programs, and much more in line with Buffalo is this respect. If your poetry interests are Dickinson and Longfellow, you're quite divorced from a department that has a number of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and affiliates in it. So yes, common sense tells me that if you're looking to write about Dryden, then you're fairly out of luck in the department. A fairly good predictor of whether or not you stand a chance at admission. If you said your specific interests, I could have told you if there's faculty members to champion it, maybe even some you didn't notice going through the website. If you wanted to know more about Philly specifically, about the Writer's House specifically, I could tell you. There's stuff online but people always have questions they can't find the answers to otherwise. I just don't know why you're being such an enormous dick about me offering to answer questions.

What do you want to know? I'm not going to sit here wasting my time writing what you could figure out if you just looked at the department website (and maybe it's because I'm biased towards it but http://www.english.upenn.edu/ is one of the most helpful straightforward department sites there is). So if you want to know something specific, say so.

I went to Penn undergrad, and I'm applying for PhD now, I can probably answer most questions about the English department that you have. Actually I could probably tell you if you even stand a chance by what your research interests are.

I've read most of the stuff people are listing. But my big gap is female writers. No Austen, no Brontes, no George Eliot, No Woolf, No Chopin, etc, etc, etc. Started many of them, but they're all just so awful.

Timshel--why are you folks freaking out so much? I feel like I'm the only person not having an aneurysm. To answer your question, log in here: https://www.gradmit.buffalo.edu/etw/gradmit.asp On the bottom left, it should say "application status", and "complete," along with a date.

How can you guys freak out about this? It's done. Just sit back, relax, drink a beer, and wait four weeks. This is the least stressful part of the whole process. There is literally nothing to do

Procrastinated on Brown for a week, but finally submitted and DONE! Can't wait for February now.

My buddy's girlfriend is at UT-Austin doing an English PhD at the moment. Only score I know she got is 650 on the Subject Test, and they thought that was exceptionally strong. She said it's all in the SoP and the Writing Sample.

Really? I sat down and pounded it out super quickly. I haven't had an racial/economic obstacles, and my research and experience has nothing to do with that, but I thought of an angle and rolled with it. Not too hard...

Anyone know how long these things should be? I can't find anything to give an indication. Mine's 970 words right now, roughly the length of my SoP. I just have no idea if I'm lowballing it by a thousand words or not.

I'm really worried that I won't get in anywhere, but two of my LoR writers said they were sure I'd get in somewhere, so Im riding off of that...

And Berkeley is December 5 instead of December 8? Glad I checked this again.

WTF? I wrote down all the deadlines in August. I had NYU listed for December 18!!!!! What the hell is going on?

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/grad_applications.htm Not sure when they did this. I was losing my shit trying to get ready for Thursday. Now I have at least until the 8th before my first app is due. Woo Hoo

I've been told to include people that could potentially chair your dissertation committee to show how well you would fit. I wouldn't Brown-Nose or act like you'll just say whatever they said, but use it as a way to expand upon things you want to say about your research interests and show a fit. E.G. I was just drafting my NYU SoP and mention wanting to work with Lytle Shaw, who wrote Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Coterie. I don't really touch on it in my general statement but O'Hara and what Shaw says about O'Hara are heavily linked, so I get a chance to explain a "fit" and say more about my research interests.

I'm applying to the Poetics Program, but for the first time, so I suppose we're competition. It's probably my number two, after Penn, but the $$ is probably going to be the big decider if it comes down to it/ I would guess that they wouldn't have the records from two years ago about why you weren't accepted. How were your GREs last time? There's always the chance you didn't reach a cut-off. And submitting the same paper is a bit of a gamble. If it's your strongest writing it shouldn't be a problem--the topic doesn't seem as important. Especially if you're talking about wanting to work with the Tedlocks when you get there. Adcoms always change too--you could have someone like them who's very friendly to Anthropoetics reading your paper. But Buffalo is super friendly to the avant-garde, and it never hurts to feed into that (my writing sample is about Pound, FYI). I guess making your fit more clear in the SoP would help. Are you really getting into specific people that you want to work with? And saying substantive things about the program? And then how are your LoRs? I'm putting a bit of faith in my Buffalo application in the fact that One of my LoRs founded the Poetics program and then ran it for twenty years. It's my trump card in the whole app.

I was talking to my buddy's GF, who is a PhD at UT-Austin, and she said if you're above 600, you're golden on the test.

Broke down and paid for the scores by phone after my mother told me she'd pay the $12. 650, 84th percentile. I'm satsified--I know they're weighted so low in the process that that score is golden.

IIRC, you can pay to get scores by phone on the 12th? Which would be ~4 weeks?

I'm including a blog project I've been working on as a self-published thing. It's probably not worth it if it's just a general blog, but the internet is a publishing platform and if you're using that for a serious academic project, then go for it.

I'm interested in 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics--especially Pound and his effects on contemporary and digital poetics.

In my sig. Looking to do work in contemporary poetry and poetics.

I'm really surprised to see people so upset by the test. Like all of you, mine was exclusively reading comp. No quick passage ID, and only a single super POE. But it made the test so much easier! Almost nothing from the 19th century, which is my weak point. And the IDs you had to do were easier for one reason-- On most of those passages that had 7+ questions, there was almost a path you could weave your way through. Some answers excluded other possibilities on meaning and identification. So it became super obvious what those were. There were at least three or four long passages like that. I ran out of time too--left about 10 questions blank. Starting moving quickly at the end, so I probably messed up, but I took the shorter passages that I also recognized in the last 10 minutes, and only answered questions that were identifying things like word syntax or literary terms, since I didn't have to read the passage the whole way through. Overall I'm really satisfied with how the test went--we'll see the results when they're out.