jasper.milvain

I'm Canadian, so I won't say much because our research proposals sound fairly different from your SoPs. For example, nobody I know has anything autobiographical in their proposal, except for a brief blurb at the end detailing academic accomplishments. The one piece of advice that I got told too late and have passed on to many people since is that you're not selling yourself as a person, you're selling yourself as a RESEARCHER. Sure, you may be super enthusiastic and really love studying X and want this really really bad. Who cares? So is/does everyone else. Professors want to see that you're professional and understand the work you're applying to do, not that you'd be a super person to have a beer with. If you can bring charm to your research goals, so much the better, but showcase your research potential first and foremost.

I totally agree with the OP. I adore the grad secretary in my department and have been watching her struggle through the admissions process while scheduling defenses, doing course pre-registration, sorting out TAships and fellowships, and gathering everyone's evaluations and contracts. To think of some impatient idiot calling her lazy and thoughtless on the boards is infuriating.

I think loft wrote a great reply. I'm one of the people who have come down against early publishing, but the benefits of publishing that loft describes are things we can all agree on: You can show these three things in your SoP and writing sample, but I can see how publication would be a good carrot to encourage you to really work at them. In my own application, I used a research proposal that I had developed for a federal grant competition as my SoP. It required me to do a field review, identify a research gap, and gather primary and secondary texts that would be of use. I revised constantly and rigorously. That is to say, the grant application process made me do the three things that loft identifies as the benefit of publishing. I got similar feedback--faculty at a school I applied to said they could see the project "as a book", and adcoms mentioned the strength of my proposal. Maybe it's more about the benefits of going through a rigorous research and revision process and less about lines on your CV?

I second everything JoeyGiraldo said, especially taking advantage of department events and talking with younger professors. The single most important thing I got from my MA was a MUCH clearer sense of what projects are actually publishable in my field now. Current critical readings were a large part of every reading list, as opposed to the token theory books I was assigned in my undergrad. I would seek out courses that put an emphasis on current scholarly work. For example, while a Renaissance class based on a small set of texts that relate to a specific topic may seem less useful than a survey of Shakespeare, if the former is constructed around a current debate, it's likely to teach you much more about the publishing world, and to result in a paper that will be potentially reworkable for publication (or an excellent writing sample).

In my TA training, we had a long talk on identifying plagiarism from our department Academic Honesty Rep., were asked to cover the issue in seminar with our students, and were strongly encouraged to take the same Academic Honesty Tutorial online that our students were required to take. I dunno... I can buy the international angle, but I don't think a lack of clarification from the prof is a fair excuse. The onus is on the student to make sure they're not breaking policy.

Thanks so much for passing that along, and congrats on the U of T love. Although "in relation to each other and on a curve" isn't very soothing information. Ah well. It's nice to know the departmental appraisal is still in the mix at the final stage. I'm starting to get twitchy about waiting. I keep trying to tell myself that it's too early to think about it, but that's not really working. I've got a weird funding set up where if I get the small SSHRC, my money actually goes down significantly, since it makes me ineligible for a certain recruitment award. The SSHRC mantra around my house has changed from "Anything please please anything" to "Go big or go home!" It's a nice problem to have. Still, a letter that actually comes in early-to-mid April instead of a long stretched out crazy delayed process would be nice. I think what's making me anxious is that I know through hearsay that at least the some rankings are already complete (friend's supervisor has returned from her not so secret top-secret trip to Ottawa) and my news is likely sitting in some database, waiting for a letter to be generated. Good luck to everyone waiting! This is the home stretch.

I got a Saturday afternoon phone call from one of the schools that accepted me.

Dramanda, the e-mail is all you'll get if you went through a school. Took long enough to come out this year, too! If anyone knows more about the actual scoring system, I'd LOVE to hear about it. I've been a pretty big SSHRC geek for two years and have never heard about the details of scoring.

Dramada, you missed that ogopogo is an external applicant going straight through Ottawa, and has no university ranking in this whole process. Obviously individual changes are fairly random, but if you go to the results spreadsheets here: http://www.sshrc.ca/site/winning-recher ... x-eng.aspx You can see that unaffiliated applicants have about a 60% success rate, which is comparable to some pretty decent schools. It's more likely than not that you're getting good news in April, although it's still a bit of a dice toss.

Huh. I was completely wrong. Apologies.

The only way I can see it making a difference is if any of those offers of admission are conditional upon you maintaining a certain average. Ws tank your GPA. Otherwise, you're fine.

I went four for four. I put an insane amount of work into my research proposal/statement of intent. I actually wrote it for a grant app that I was asked to complete with one week's notice. I spent all week writing one or two drafts a day and circulating my proposal among my classmates, professors, ex-classmates, random homeless dudes on the street... Then when I didn't get that grant, I did maybe one or two more drafts of it for my application to the generic version of the same grant. For apps, I removed the end part about what school I wanted to attend, and otherwise used the exact same proposal. When it came to actually applying, I totally bailed on the whole process. I didn't contact one single professor, and I felt like I was going to throw up every time I went to fill out an application. Man, I got lucky.

Fair enough! There's probably a happy medium in there somewhere.

It's not a bad commute to the actual city, since there are a katrillion busses servicing campus. It's a fairly long walk, maybe 15-20 minutes, to get from campus to Kits. I don't know why you'd walk, though, since it's so well connected by transit. Apartments in Kits will be pretty pricey unless you're looking for student places, basements, etc. I've paid anywhere between $400 and $600 a month for my share in some fairly crappy, damp, spider infested basements. Affordable, but I don't wanna do it again. I'd say living on campus isn't a bad bet, because you can get off it pretty quickly by car or bus, and Kits has lots of good restaurants and bars. The food on campus isn't bad, there's a cheap second run movie theater, a gym and pool, etc. There are three bars on campus. Go to Koerner's, the happy laid back grad pub. Avoid The Pit, which is a dank hole of an undergrad meat market.

These aren't mutually exclusive options. If you have a good, well thought out question, you've likely come to it through reading, and you can gather together the texts (primary, secondary, whatever) that inspired you and use them to find other texts that participate in the same conversation. I agree that like everyone else, academics can have tunnel vision. But equating tunnel vision and doing a thorough job of framing your research proposal seems counterproductive to the OP's inital problem.

*shrugs* My friends who sat on job search committees said cluttered publishing records with lots of low to mid level publishing performed at a disadvantage against publishing records with fewer publications in better journals. I've heard similar things from enough sources that I trust to believe it.

Nothing wrong with looking professional. First impressions get formed really quickly, and are often irrational. Someone may believe intellectually that clothing is unimportant, but still be unable to shake their immediate sense that someone is a slob, or undisciplined, etc. Spending two years TAing has convinced me of the importance of presentation. Sure, students are ultimately going to recognize your ability if you're a good TA. But you'll get to that realization faster if you dress like a grownup who takes teaching seriously.

You sound like you're on the right track. You don't want to dress up and end up feeling uncomfortable or tugging at a shirt that you forgot fits you weird all day. I'd say if you're wearing clothes that you can imagine a professor teaching in, you're fine. I wore dark jeans, a nice shirt, a blazer, and my usual walking shoes, and fit right in.

I was indeed thinking of having a life, or setting up an excellent Plan B. I (embarrassingly) wasn't considering the clarification of ideas that might come from working towards publication. That process is obviously very valuable, but the paperwork side would be an investment of time, and yet another exercise in stress, waiting, and possible rejection to pile on top of an already brutal process. You mean conference proceedings? Can't see much wrong with that. Think of it this way, though--we're working towards dissertations. Likely, the subjects that we're most passionate about at the moment will be part of those dissertations. If you want to turn your dissertation into a book once you're done (in the magical universe where we all get tenure track jobs) it's best not to have published more than two chapters of it, according to Colon-Semenza's excellent _Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities_. When do you want to publish those two big chunks of your first big idea: when you're CV building and scrambling to get in, or once you've had the benefit of more years of coursework and exams to expand your knowledge about the discipline and your field, with your PhD supervisor to consult for edits? You can keep taking the same paper to conference after conference, but you can't keep publishing it. If you print a crappier version of your pet project in, say, an author-specific graduate journal, you may regret not being able to send it in to a major journal in your field later. Again, I'm in Canada, so things may be different here. But most of my PhD friends didn't publish until their second or third year, and then they started with book reviews. I have two grad conferences and three guest lectures at undergrad classes, and that's been good enough to get me into all the schools I applied to (again, in Canada) and get my federal research funding application to the final stage of review. Of course, I absolutely KILLED myself over my research proposal (Sop equivalent?) and did a thorough lit review, multiple revisions and review sessions, etc. That way, I'm working towards publishing eventually and developing my ideas, but I'm doing it in a more private way that doesn't commit me to my current views or cut off publishing opportunities for the future. I'm sure that there are lots of other situations in which early publication makes a lot more sense, and I'm sure everyone is capable of making their own call. This is just my two cents.

This might actually work. I had to outline my imaginary dissertation for a grant application last fall. I'm about to complete an MA, and was at a total freakin loss. It was like being asked to name imaginary unicorns in my magical fairyland stables. I told my supervisor I didn't know what a dissertation looks like, and she said "Roughly, they look like books." It might help to grab a few (recent, relevant) monographs and look at how they're structured. How many authors overall? A focus on a period, a theme, a movement? How specific is the focus? It really helped me think about my project in a more detailed way, and the grant app has been successful so far (knock wood). You sound like you want the challenge, but to be honest my knee-jerk reaction to people who say "Oh, I haven't chosen a field yet. I just have so many interests!" is to assume that they lack rigor and haven't put the work into defining a project yet. That's probably a fairly common reaction that you're working against. Maybe if you think about it in terms of proving that you're capable of coming up with a complex project (and that you know how the system works, by extension) instead of committing yourself to a life path, you'll be able to bring your SoP into focus.

This is exactly what I was going to post. The OP's plan sounds good, but I'm not sold on the publishing part. There's a saying that goes "You can publish your way into any position... but you can also publish your way out." I'm not sure that there's any journal repuatable enough to help your chances that will take MA work. The vast majority of successful candidates haven't published yet, simply because they're too 'young' as academics. This sounds like a way to spend a lot of time that could be more productively used elsewhere.

The funny thing is that everybody knows this, but everybody thinks it only applies to *other* people.

The secret to minimizing grocery costs in Vancouver is to get as much food as you can from the smaller produce stores instead of the big chains. There are tons of small stores, mostly run by Asian immigrants, where you can get beautiful fruits and veggies (and sometimes bulk foods) for much less than you'd pay elsewhere. You can buy a whole bag of fresh groceries for $10-$15 if you buy in-season produce. If you're super-desperate, they usually also have $1 bags of veggies that are about to go bad. I have friends who buy them regularly, cut off the bad parts, chop em up and freeze them so that they have an endless supply of vegetables to make curries out of when they get poor. I think that because there's such a high proportion of non-whites in Vancouver racism can actually be WORSE here than elsewhere because people feel threatened. But most of the reactionary stuff is anti-Asian, so as a latino you should be able to fly under most of the bigots' radar.

I found asking "What problems are the most common / what do people usually complain about?" to be helpful. I got some great tips on how to avoid common problems that way.

What comfect said, plus a healthy dose of mentioning what I'm working on to friends and faculty when given the chance, and following up on any suggestions.