Grunty DaGnome

I'm so jealous of other programs that aready know their fate I try not to be jealous, but I am.

I love how "lawyers" are considered the pinnacle of good editing. I work in a law firm now and I can't tell you how many government documents still have all kinds of references to Enron that the prosecuting attorney failed to edit out of the template.

I spend the last three weeks worrying I wouldn't get in anywhere. Now, I'm starting to think the year off might be beneficial to my health. I've been out of undergrad 10 years, so I feel, on the one hand, there's really no time to lose. On the other hand, working and earning an MA has been pretty hard on me physically. Plan B for me, therefore, involves a great deal of yoga, a great deal of weight lifting, back strengthening exercises, long walks, cooking for myself instead of eating so much freakin' chinese take out...oh yeah, and taking a vacation that doesn't involve writing a 20 page research paper.

The boards have some acceptances from UVA as early as late February. I applied to UVA before I entered the MA, and at that time, I wound up in UVA purgatory for a long time -- no rejection or acceptance for the PhD or MA -- well into late March. Who knows why, perhaps because they are a state school and their funding issues are often TBD until much later in the calendar year. UVA seems to go in stages as compared to Brown or Columbia, both of which tend to make all or most of their acceptances in a single week, then release their flood of rejections the following week.

I did undergrad at WUSTL. Transportation has improved in recent years. Every so often, people would walk their dogs on campus and the college has done a lot to improve student lives on campus. It's a really safe campus and the professors really care about their students and ensure that they're getting a top-notch education with plenty of research opportunities. The English Grad Students always seemed to be happy.

Everyone knows about Nome, Alaska, but did you know there is also a Nome, Texas?

WUSTL is a great school for dog lovers!

Oh, it looks bad for Boston, then. I had a friend with two giant labs and she had to move out near Longwood Medical, the not very nice part of the city, to find an apartment that would have her.

Columbia's English Phd application allows you to apply for related MAs when you apply for the PhD. I don't remember now exactly what the deal was, but you did have to pay a second application fee. I'm not sure why, but pushing different yet unrelated MA applications seems to be part of their recruitment plan.

Incomplete Records

UVA, Columbia and Boston College will reject me outright on the basis of the not ready for prime time sample I sent. Brown and BU will accept me. They will, dammit!

It seems they made a fairly early decision in your favor, so I wouldn't consider it a consolation MA. Call the department and ask them for help finding outside grants. It's a kick in the gut, but don't roll over just yet.

That's just cold.

If I DO get in somewhere, it means I'll be quitting my job and I won't be able to afford to get myself anything. If I don't get in anywhere, I'm going to Europe.

Maybe it's a form letter sent to women applicants, but only those who meet their minimum cut off requirements I'd like to think you've cleared at least one preliminary hurdle.

Sicilian wine, the kind you have to chew.

Uh, me too. Applications drained me emotionally.

Keep in mind that waitlisted people are desperately searching the web trying to figure out who might have a pending acceptance to their waitlisted school and any other school. Unless you want them IMing you to tell you X is their dream school and you should hurry up and make up your mind between X and Y, both of whom, according to your Facebook, have extended you an offer, you should probably keep this information to yourself. Nothing against hypothetical waitlisted student. I would probably do the same, though I'd feel really bad about pressuring whomever it was that had my golden ticket...as I emailed once an hour.

Despite the fact that this seems to be a very unpopular sentiment, I'm going to stick my two cents in. I felt the same for a long time, especially about Jane Austin [i know, I know! There are rabid Austen fans out there! Just hear me out]. I couldn't get into Austen at all because EVERY book is about getting married and the narrative intrusions interject all sorts of sentimental and Anglo-centric, unwittingly imperialist values. Huge turn-off. Based on this, I could never understand why so many women's studies majors and feminists embrace her. Eventually, I learned to appreciate Austen's poetics. Wayne Booth is a big proponent of her narrative technique. There are also many interesting cognitive theory papers about Austen and "empathy," detailing how her narrative style constructs the interior world of her "off stage" characters through consistent focused implication. For these reasons, I changed my position on Austen, at least regarding her technique. The subject matter is, for me, still not terribly interesting, but that is just a matter of personal taste -- something we have to put aside at times, I suppose, if we want to be scholars and not just avid readers. That, for what its worth, is my best defense of Jane Austen, from the point of view of a reformed Jane Austen anti-fan.

Up until tonight, I have been obsessing about how I won't get in to any schools and I should start thinking about my re-application approach for next year. It seems like a reasonable strategy to prepare for bad news, right? Well, tonight, I purposely indulged wild fantasies of getting alot of acceptances. Just thinking about getting that first call and being excited, then getting a second one and thinking through the kind of tough decisions I would have to make if I got in to most of my choices. Nothing has changed since yesterday. I still don't know where I stand as far as my future is concerned, but I tell you what, I'm a whole lot less exhausted tonight as I crawl into bed. It feels good to just let myself dream for a day or two.

I would guess that, in winnowing down the applicant pool, the ad com votes and some applicants get a unanimous vote right away, while other applications need further discussion and evaluation. So, to keep things moving, I assume programs notify those candidates they know will get offers, rather than hold up the offers while they resolve their debates about other candidates. I imagine, too, that many candidates fall on the MA offer or MA PhD all at once offer, while others might be on the line between MA offer and rejection. I was on that line for several schools before I started my MA. My rejection to two schools never came, because I accepted an MA offer and withdrew my applications. Both admin offices explicitly told me at that my application was still being considered for the MA, but not the PhD. On the other hand, there are a bunch of people notified right away that they won't get in. While no one likes to be in this pile, in some ways, it is more merciful.

First of all, the whole reason a school's acceptance rate is above 10 % is probably because they have less than great financial Aid. UMASS - Amherst comes to mind. I think their stipend is around 14k. CUNY's is around 16k. Still, both are quite good department and fairly competitive. I don't know the exact numbers. Probably many fewer applicants than Brown or NYU, but they are far from safety schools.

Ha, thanks Jerzygrl. I think that post was inspired by the fact that I'm spending too much time following the Primary election. It caused me to go atomic-negative for no clear reason and to gratuitously invoke the specter of Hitler.

Ha ha! I'm finishing a paper on Moby-Dick right now. Even though I am hating writing this paper, I do think it's the greatest book ever written. Hopefully, you'll pick it up again or take a random American Lit class someday just because it's on the syllabus. Be careful though, because people tend to fall into two categories; people who have never read Moby-Dick and people who re-read Moby-Dick about once a year. Moby-Dick is kinda like potato chips. Once you start, you can't stop. My area of total ignorance is anything new or trendy...to an absurd degree. No Cormac what's his face, nothing from that guy who left the Oprah book club, then returned to it, no books with the word "tatoo" in the title, nothing about "soup" or "Maury" or "ashes" of any kind or "Speaking Pretty." No Joan Didion, whatever it means to be Joan Didion or to read her. I just can't ever bring myself to read more than 2 pages of anything on those very appealing tables in book stores. Friends sometimes give me books for gifts and at this point, I usually give them away before I even bring them home, because I just know I'll never read the thing. I am also wholly ignorant of most French writers and poets. I've read about 1/2 of Proust's Rememberance of Things Past and 2 chapters of Zola but no Flaubert, no Verlaine, no Baudlaire, and these are the guys I always mean to get around to reading, I just can't seem to find a way into them.

You are totally a G, Timshel!