RoundandRoundAgain

Can someone who was rejected let us know what website you're checking for status? I know my ApplyYourself account still hasn't changed and I don't see a decision log-in.

So much great advice and recommendations! Thank you!

I, too, was just waitlisted to one of my dream programs, the joint PhD in English/Women's Studies at Michigan. The email was all about the mixed news and how it would be hard to process. Hilariously enough, I had already put them on my rejection list pretty much as soon as I turned in my application because they only take 2 people and watching the acceptances go out last week just reinforced that. The hard part to process is being waitlisted at all with everything I know about the program. And then it leads to how short of a waitlist does a program have for 2 spots?

I spent a week in Boston about six years ago and I fell in love with it. The Tufts call was so amazing just because of my love for the city. Even if I do wind up with other offers, I'm going to have a really difficult time turning down Tufts. Recommendations would definitely be welcomed.

I spent a long night last night re-reading Tufts webpage and looking up housing and part-time jobs on Craigslist after my call with Dr. Haber. Hope is a really amazing thing and I wish I had appreciated it more instead of tamping down on it so violently to keep it from hurting so much. Choices, possibilities - I hereby will appreciate it more now that I'm in the moment of not having to worry about staying at my dead end job.

At this point, I'm going to go out on a limb and tell you you haven't doomed yourself. I wrote about oneirocriticism in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless in my writing sample so postmodern pornography can work. Did you apply to Brandeis and UCR? Those were the only 2 schools I could find with Kathy Acker scholars in the faculty.

My stress is related to my only acceptance with Brandeis and my waitlist at UCR. I applied to 15 schools, only 2 of which were MA programs (I ran out of time for Brandeis's PhD so I wound up applying to the MA program) and it's looking likely that I'm not going to get into any of the PhD programs that I have left (except Tufts, please, Tufts, take me!). I suspect that I'm ultimately going to wind up with a choice between Brandeis's MA and UCR's PhD. The pros and cons for each situation are terribly difficult. Even with the debt, Brandeis is a wonderful program that I can complete in one year which is important because I'm 32, but I don't really want to go through the PhD application process again so soon. Yet I know there's so many things I could have done better in terms of overall application so a do-over might not be the worst thing. As for UCR, I love the faculty, the classes, the overall department, but it is my alma mater and that could be a bad thing down the road once I graduate. I really want another acceptance if only to make this particular decision easier.

I took an introductory comp course at my university (it was the third in a sequence) and our grad student used pop culture for most of our assignments. We read a really fantastic introductory pop culture anthology and wrote four papers overall. The first was a paper on a movie scene, the second and third were on movies or television, and only the fourth was on a novel. I suspect it will be dependent on your department's guidelines for composition classes and how much freedom you have to shape your own curriculum, but it is possible with feeling more comfortable with film.

Congrats to whoever snagged the joint PhD in English and Women's Studies on the results board! You're so lucky.

It took me all of high school and four undergrad Shakespeare classes to read Othello and Julius Caesar (and I didn't read A Midsummer Night's Dream until that third undergrad Shakespeare class). I have, however, had to read Hamlet for four classes (three times in the space of one year once).

There is so many things I haven't read that I feel like I've missed out on: Dickens (especially Great Expectations) Little Women Late Henry James ("The Turn of the Screw" as an example) The Hunger Games (seriously, I don't know why I haven't read this yet - I love YA lit) Poe (I'm not sure I've read any poetry other than "Annabel Lee") Poetry in general (so much poetry I haven't read especially Romantic and American) - this is what doomed me on GRE Lit

I admire the UT Austin English department for posting this announcement: "As of February 15, 2012, we have made our first round admission offers for the Ph.D. program in English. Over the next week, we will be re-reviewing our applicant pool to compile a wait list. Final admission decisions will be made by Friday, February 24, 2012." I'm disappointed but pleased that they're so forthright about where they are in the process. Good luck to the rest of us waiting.

I haven't taken a class with Dr. Kinney, but my ex-roommate loved taking her classes (her interest is war literature so I suspect you would have a great deal in common). She's "approachable, tough, fair, and smart." Even though Dr. Axelrod's primary interest is poetry, he also has a secondary interest in war poetry and literature (and postmodernism) so he would be a good person to get to know. He was my honors thesis advisor and he's wonderfully knowledgeable and friendly plus he changed my opinion for the better on poetry. He's one of the kindest men I've ever met and he tells the best stories.

Me, too! Yay!

No, it's okay - I can see that it's a strange disconnect. It's probably easiest for me to say that I'm attracted to postmodern poetry from people like Amy Gerstler and Sylvia Plath because it's tighter than the prose in the genre. The wordplay, absurdity, pop culture references, and ideas of postmodernism usually has a lot to say about identity, gender roles, and community values. As someone who has become deeply interested in gender and sexuality over the past two years and the connection they have to literature from past until now, the ideas of postmodernism are central to why I enjoy reading it. Kathy Acker is the exception in terms of prose (so far) because her novels are far more about gender, sexuality, ideological power, and all the ideas that come out of identity and what it is to be human. In Empire of the Senseless, I can pick out at least half a dozen coherent ideas that she wants to convey about humanity in spite of the occasional segues because it's less about stream-of-consciousness and more about a stream of ideas. I don't need everything in the novel to be coherent, just something about the prose that should be coherent whether it's story, plot, structure, or characters. I love nonlinear stories, character introspections, experimental structures - I just don't love them all at the same time. I can appreciate Finnegan's Wake as an experimental novel that helped the shift from modernism to postmodernism, but the novel is difficult, frequently incoherent, and Iong. (As this post probably is at this point).

If you're okay with just being near a bus stop, there's a lot of apartments along Canyon Crest as you move toward Central Ave that are further away from the main hub of campus and it doesn't seem like as many students live there. The trolleys go toward the Ralphs shopping center and that general area a lot. I don't really know that being gated matters as much. My apartments were open (except for the parking) and it didn't seem like it made that much of a difference. I know we had less crime than Grand Marc across the street which was enclosed. It's probably better to ask the management of the apartments you're looking at how much vandalism and car theft there has been in the last couple of years. One suggestion I have to make for people who visit UCR is to go a little ways down University and try Jafang's Pizza. It's the best pizza in the world and the staff is really friendly. I'm really interesting in which faculty people want to study with in the department. I can also talk a little bit about the role of grad students in my undergrad classes if anyone wants to know about that.

So many great suggestions on this thread! In sticking with the BBC adaptations, North and South is amazing and I really enjoyed Middlemarch. I hated Lost in Austen though. A Series of Unfortunate Events did a great job of capturing the spirit of Lemony Snicket and did a pretty decent job of covering the first three books of the series.

Wow, another person who wants to be an Acker scholar, yay! Empire of the Senseless is the best book I've read in the last year (in fact, I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Abhor, gender ideology, and dreams which wound up being my writing sample for almost everywhere). On topic: I have to say that I agree with Faulkner - in The Sound and the Fury, I was far more interested in the people who weren't narrators like both Caddys. I was also not impressed with Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre which is basically blasphemy considering my time period, but the first hundred pages of Jane bored me to tears and I hate everyone in WH.

For me, it's James Joyce. First, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in high school and then Finnegan's Wake. Just a world of no. I'm not sure stream-of-consciousness will ever be my thing because I discovered I need something coherent in a novel to finish it (characters, plot, story, structure) and Joyce just pushes all the wrong buttons. I will echo the dislike of Beloved (thank goodness I later read Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye).

I'm personally very relived although still sure that I won't get accepted (it's always been my snowball's chance in hell application with the 2 people accepted out of who knows how many applications). Thank you for checking on that!

I lived off-campus actually at The Palms on University. It's not the best for married people since most are 4 bedroom, 4 bath apartments and I would recommend against GrandMarc because of the crime. University Village might be a good possibility as they have a decent reputation and smaller apartments although they have lots of international students. I've been looking at Highlander Pointe as an upgrade for graduate school though it's slightly farther away because it's bound to be quieter. I will say that most of the crime on or near campus seems to happen near Canyon Crest Family Housing, but it's usually in the middle of night after 1 AM. One of the best things about UCR is that students ride the Riverside Transit buses and trolleys for free and they run relatively frequently during the day (also good because UCR parking is notoriously terrible unless you have a really good parking plan). UCR also has people on duty at night to walk you home if you stay at the library until midnight and you live off campus. The English department and the buildings for most classes are going to be on the side of campus next to the 60/215 freeways so streets like University, Canyon Crest (near the school), Linden, Blaine would all be good options for apartments within walking distance.

I'll come out as a longtime lurker to claim one of the waitlists. I applied to UCR because I just completed my undergrad work there and the faculty is amazing. I only attended UCR for about two years so I wouldn't mind having the chance to continue to do work with the faculty. I will attest to the fact that the professors are brilliant yet approachable (which is not always easy) and that they are extremely encouraging about new and creative methods of research.