pinkrobot

I'm in a PhD program at a school that has a BA/MA program. During the break in one class, a BA/MA student asked our professor this same question. The professor said it's actually not a good idea at all to have all your degrees from the same place, even if that place has a fantastic department and program for your subject. Going to the same place for all of your degrees means that you've essentially spent about a decade (probably more than that) of your life--and super formative years at that--cooking in the same theoretical, ideological soup, you know?

For what it's worth, in my writing sample for one of my top choices, I ended a paragraph without a period, forgot a citation, and had what may possibly be the world's worst title. (Seriously, the title may well have been "[insert Placeholder Here]": it was not precisely that, but it was a phrase that I'd hoped to replace with a good title when I managed to think of one, which did not happen until weeks after that first deadline.) I am attending that program right now. Take heart!

I wonder if you've seen these two threads on the Chronicle forum; they may be useful to you: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=61660.0 http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,59893.15.html I think it looks like this one might fall into the laughable category, unfortunately.

Seconding the vote for the Penn list. Since you're in a program, maybe you could ask your adviser/professor/DGS for specific recommendations? Also, I should confess that mostly I am posting because I'm currently working on my first paper as a PhD student and, relatedly, I thought your thread title read, "Finding literary confidence." ("Oh! Hey! There's a way to get that?")

I think there was a thread earlier this year where someone set up a poll to ask who spoke to professors ahead of time, who didn't, and what their results were. I think that thread showed that there didn't seem to be much correlation between the categories; relatedly, I also personally know a lot of people who didn't contact professors and wouldn't change a thing about their choice, and a lot of people who did contact professors and wouldn't change a thing about their choice, and a lot of people who did one or the other and wishes they'd done the other one. Probably this is up to each person and has a lot more to do with how someone approaches a professor than if someone approaches a professor. Likely it wouldn't hurt for each person to ask their advisors for more individual guidance. This is a good point, and most likely really, really true for English as well. I did keep this in mind when I mentioned professors in my statement. But I tried to cobble together an understanding of what the professors are currently working on or have worked on somewhat recently through their CVs (especially recent conference presentations or recent publications), courses they most recently taught, and their published articles and books. All of these have their strengths and weaknesses as far as currentness of information goes (CVs may not be updated; a professor may have taught one course or another for a reason that doesn't have to do with their own research interests; articles and books take a long time to come out, so may not reflect current interests), but it seemed to work well enough. And I just didn't want to risk contacting professors, especially since my advisers advised against it (not to mention, I was really nervous about it!). All that being said ... although what I mention in the previous paragraph made a lot of sense to me when applying and makes sense to me still, I actually think that having a super accurate sense of a professor's interests is perhaps a bit less important than we might think. This is all conjecture and I might be completely nuts; my impression, however, comes from one school to which I applied, thinking (after a TON of reading) that one professor there would be a really good fit. (Actually, I put the school on my list a few years ago, immediately after reading one of this professor's books.) I was accepted, but the professor I had in mind had actually just left the university. (Oops.) While I did mention other professors too, with a genuine interest in their work, I would have previously thought that my uninformedness about this professor would have hurt my candidacy and the absence of that professor would have decreased my fit. So while I would never say that the research isn't important, and I know everyone emphasizes fit and I think it's really important for us to do our part in trying to figure out the fit, I think it might be helpful to know that it is okay--and, actually, perfectly logical, acceptable, and the basis of the entire reason that we're applying to school in the first place whereas the professors have already done this and then some--that we know much less than the professors in the departments. See, similarly, I'm not entirely sure about this either. I would have totally agreed with you before I'd gone through this round of applications, and in general, I still think (as I say above) that we should definitely do all the research we possibly can. But, you know, a part of me wonders ... these degrees are five-plus years long, and the first two years (for those of us entering with BAs, at least) are coursework. Would it really wound an application to mention a professor who will not be there during your first year but will be--and may well be open to advisees--in your last four or more years? I also previously would have thought that it would be a really bad call to reference a professor who is not at the school during the year that your application is being read--but during the interviews of one of the schools to which I applied, I know that professors who were not on campus still conducted interviews with applicants over Skype. My sense is that this process is a little more holistic than I had previously thought. There are probably many things involved--not just a consideration of the upcoming year, but a consideration of the upcoming five years; not just a consideration of number of advisees, but a consideration of establishing a balanced incoming cohort; probably a million other things, too--that we can't anticipate. I guess what I'm saying here is that there seem to be no hard and fast rules, except that I would suggest that an applicant do their due diligence to the best of his/her capability and work as hard as he/she can on his/her materials. One person's experience will probably not help another person all that much, which isn't to say that this conversation is pointless (I don't think it is! I like all you guys and I think you all have great points! ), but rather to say that you can probably take some comfort knowing that no matter what you do (within the limits of reason, obviously), your candidacy probably has a lot to do with stuff we don't even know about, so just do your best, and listen to your gut as well as the advice of people you trust.

Hmm. This actually isn't applicable across disciplines: I heard from a lot of people that, in English, full departments--not necessarily individual professors--accept students. And there are a million debates about whether contacting a professor ahead of time is even a good idea. For what it's worth, I did not contact the professors I mentioned. This, though, lines up with what I heard (and what I did) for English: Yes, I mentioned professors in my statements. But, like TakeruK says, I actually didn't think of it as name-dropping: what I wanted to do was tell the departments about some things that their professors are doing that really inspire me. I didn't think about it as trying to get anyone's attention, but rather as illustrating my rationale for why I thought I was a good fit for the school; also, I didn't think about it as referencing a professor, but rather as referencing a professor's work. Yes, I think these mentions made my statement stronger: they comprised the vast majority of each fit paragraph.

This. And I'm going to miss my current city/state like crazy, so there's some of that going on, too, while I'm simultaneously really excited to get going with the program.

Can any of your recommenders speak to your proficiency in Italian? If you explain the circumstances to them, just as you have to us, would any of them be willing and able to mention that your grades in these courses do not reflect your ability? Good luck!

To add another layer of intrigue into this rankings conversation ... We've so far been talking US News. But there's another system--the NRC rankings--which has several subcategories, within which each program is classified according to a range of rankings, each of which could potentially be the "actual" ranking. Find the English NRC rankings here: http://chronicle.com...English/124728/ While these theoretically seem pretty useful (for sure, I think their methodology seems more sound than the US News folks' approach), they still don't deliver much actual information, and to add an additional level of excitement into the mix, they often contradict the US News offerings. A striking example: UC Berkeley's S-Rank is 27-56 on the NRC list, meaning that for the category of strength in the "criteria that scholars say are most important," NRC determined that Berkeley could rank anywhere from 27th to 56th amongst the schools sampled. There have also been some issues with accurate data collection: many departments have noted that NRC vastly overestimated the number of professors in their departments, which skewed the "Research" ranking significantly. (The Research rankings have a lot to do with how many publications and awards per professor each department had or received; an overly large denominator of professors would slaughter that figure.) What to make of the data clutter? I have no idea, except that it confirms to me that there's no exact thing as "the best" program. (My experience trying to select which school I'd attend also confirms this: every time I found a "pro" for one school, I found other "pros" for the other ones.) This leads me to agree with Stately Plump that there is no clear way to determine feasibility of acceptance, and to also agree with Phil Sparrow that the idea of publishing cutoffs has quite a few downsides. With the difficulty of ranking programs so clearly demonstrated, imagine how difficult ranking applicants must be! This is a really loose analogy, but if a school were to say it simply won't take a student with a GPA under 3.5, the equivalent might be if a student refused to apply to a school that offered a stipend of under $20,000. I don't think any of us would agree that said student was evaluating schools fairly: we might say that his or her cutoff was arbitrary and didn't account for a variety of factors, including the many other assets that the school undoubtedly has, not to mention the school's overall finances and cost of living in the region. Similarly, we might say to the school that published a hard-line 3.5 cutoff that they're not being fair to students who have considerable strengths through the rest of their portfolio, or that they haven't considered the difficulty of the student's undergrad institution or other life circumstances that the student experienced. For my part, I used the rankings list to come up with a broad range of places that have solid English PhD programs. This was particularly helpful for broadening my search outside of my current geographical region, which is where I've lived my whole life--I found that there were many schools that I would have disregarded (and, indeed, did disregard during my first round of applications) not because they're not amazing schools, but because, frankly, I'm young and this country is big and has a lot of universities. From there, I ran the list of schools I wanted to apply to by my recommenders, who have a much, much better sense of the strength of my application and the "reputation" of various universities than I could possibly hope to and than a list could possibly indicate. As for trying to figure out whether I would be accepted: I didn't. I tried to pick schools that might be interested in what I was putting down, and I tried to make my profile as strong as it could possibly be (in terms of both the words and the numbers). Beyond that, I used the uber-concrete method of crossing my fingers, tossing salt over my shoulder, and not opening umbrellas indoors.

psst--if this affects your decision, you may want to know that Sullivan was reinstated as president of UVA couple days ago: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/06/teresa_sullivan_reinstated_as_the_president_of_the_university_of_virginia_.html

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/11/u-virginia-president-leave-over-philosophical-differences http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/18/reports-suggest-uva-board-wanted-president-eliminate-language-programs and on the subject of the faculty's feelings about this, which Phil Sparrow alludes to, the most recent development there appears to be: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/higher-education/university-of-virginia-faculty-ask-rector-to-resign-after-popular-presidents-ouster/2012/06/18/gJQAxbGCmV_story.html

just popping in to say: don't worry about the no-MA thing. Some schools prefer students with a BA only, others prefer students with an MA in hand, and still others--like the program I'm headed to, which I think accepts about half with MAs and half with BAs--don't lean any which way (instead, they have two different tracks depending on whether you have a BA, which means you enter in "full standing," or an MA, which means you enter in "advanced standing"). From what I've heard, in terms of admissions across-the-board, there are advantages and disadvantages to belonging to either category. I don't have an MA, and many of my friends who are in grad school didn't have one either when they applied--I don't get the sense that this contributed to any of the rejections or acceptances I received.

1) Imogene's idea of updating the Canterbury paper with a postmodern or transgressive approach sounds super cool. I'm too ignorant about all three of those subjects to be able to conceptualize how that would go, but I would totally be curious to read that. 2) I feel like a doof for for writing "it's" instead of "its" in one spot in my previous post. 3) "pinky obit" would be 5000x more inspired than my actual username.

Would it be possible for you to write something new? That's what I did, and while it's not without it's challenges, I do think it's pretty important to have a sample that relates to whatever you pitch in your statement of purpose. I think the close relation between my two documents helped me a lot, and most people I spoke to about the issue seemed to feel similarly. Maybe you could take a class that relates to your interest and get a paper out of that?

(I was wondering about that while typing my post! I was going to look it up, but it slipped my mind and since then I've had that nagging feeling you get when you forget something. So, thanks!)

Just to chime with the above, you may want to take a look at this article from last year in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all Similarly, from a more recent NYT piece (http://www.nytimes.c...-bono-plan.html): "Recent law school graduates face a growing employment crisis: the Law School Transparency Data Clearinghouse lists 67 schools (out of the 185 that were scored) with full-time legal employment rates below 55 percent. At the same time, law school tuition and student debt have skyrocketed. The average 2011 law graduate from Syracuse owes $132,993, not including any debt incurred for undergraduate education. At Pace, the figure is $139,007; at New York Law School, $146,230. "After commencement, things get worse. Law graduates often borrow more money for bar preparation, to pay for both living expenses and prep courses, which can cost more than $3,000. Even graduates with good jobs lined up face tight summer budgets; many work in retail or food service to make ends meet, as do many law students." I don't know anything about the situation for MBAs--except that the degree is becoming ubiquitous and the tuition is staggering. This is probably none of my business, and for all I know, you're a Rockefeller. But, for what it's worth, and speaking as someone pursuing a degree that has staggeringly low job prospects: the one thing I kept firmly in mind was that if I could not get into a good program with a livable stipend and tuition remission, I would have to put this idea in the "pipe dream" category. I've heard that stipends and tuition remission are not part of the package for most MA degrees, including JDs and MBAs. Proceed with caution?

PMing you.

To offer another method: I had better results from writing something original to match the page limit (give or take--obviously some nipping and tucking were ultimately required for some schools) rather than excerpting my senior honors thesis. I found that my thesis constantly referred to one thing or another from a previous chapter: when I tried to excerpt it for my previous round of applications, I am pretty sure that I accidentally spayed it. Another reason why I wrote something new was that my research interests had evolved and my honors thesis no longer perfectly fit the bill. The following is totally spot on: So, since I had a few ideas for something new that would fit my statement of purpose like a glove, I went ahead and gave it a go, with happy results. That said, YMMV. There are downsides to writing something new: I spent a lot of time on this because, of course, it takes a lot longer to research, draft, write, and revise something from scratch than it does to work off of something that already exists. Since I have graduated and my former profs are busy people, I did not get--nor did I expect to get--anywhere near the amount of feedback on this paper as I previously had on my thesis. Related to the above: the task of getting your hands on JStor and out-of-print academic titles when unenrolled should be categorized as an Olympic sport.

I'm in!

I agree with ktel. Your age may well be something you're proud of, but it's not an academic qualification in the least. I actually would also refrain from mentioning it in your statement of purpose--it would strike me as irrelevant and thus perhaps immature (and I say this as someone who, in a previous round of applications a few years ago, included irrelevant information that was likely perceived as immature!), which is not the impression you want to give. Since you mentioned that you're applying for US programs specifically, I wonder if you are not from the US? In that case: US CVs lack a LOT of the personal information that is typical of other countries' resumes and such. Some folks I know from other countries are accustomed to including things like date of birth, marital status, and a photograph, all of which would be out-of-bounds on US CVs. It might help you to take a look at the Chronicle of Higher Education (they have several articles/blog posts on CVs in, I think the "Advice" section) as well as a website called The Professor Is In (one link in particular you might find useful: http://theprofessori...he-academic-cv/). A lot of this stuff is for people going on the job market (e.g., either ABD or with a PhD already in hand), so most of it will likely not apply at this stage of your academic life, but I found both websites helped give me a sense of what I should be aiming for. I also looked at the (massive and hugely intimidating) CVs of professors at the schools I applied to, similarly to help establish a sense of what is expected and what is inappropriate.

I've recently had good luck scouring my uni's off-campus housing page. It's not only for actual university grad housing (although that kind of stuff is there too)--it also has a lot of houses for rent and for sale by private people who have typically rented to my uni's students, post docs, and professors. Maybe your uni has one of these, too? I browsed and sent out maybe 30 emails over the course of a few weeks, narrowed things down from there, and found one place I really liked. Then I asked a current grad student who's already in the area (and who I have met in person) to please check out the showing for me and take some pictures (so I could rest assured that the pictures the house owner showed me were not fakes, etc.), asked for the contact information of the current tenants (to check in about stuff like the condition of the house, the general M.O. of the house's owner as a landlord, the safety of the area), did a little search on the house's owner and the names of the tenants (to make sure they're real humans), double-checked that the house's owner is REALLY the house's owner (to avoid getting stuck in a foreclosure scam or a similar situation), had several phone conversations with the house's owner, and then took the plunge and snagged it. I'm coupled with pets and furniture, too, so I really wasn't keen on the couch surfing or motel hanging ideas. If it'd come to that, I'd've gone a week ahead of the brood so it would just be me doing the surfing, not me + partner + dog + cats (which would = disaster). Also, the rental market of the area around my uni is kind of helter-skelter--good places come and go very quickly, especially for start dates around Aug./Sept.--and I would not have been able to afford short-notice plane tickets. It can be dicey to do things the way I did--I've heard horror stories of renting sight-unseen. I think the key is to do the legwork from afar as best as you possibly can and have a person who is already in the area scope it out for you: in other words, make it as not-sight-unseen as earthly possible. There's no way I would have done things this way if I hadn't known a flesh-and-blood person who was willing and able to go see the other flesh-and-blood people involved. And many things about the house's owner put me at ease, too, which helped: for one, she was definitely interested in checking me and my partner out thoroughly to make sure WE weren't scamming HER. If she was too eager to rent to us right off the bat, I'd've been worried. Never once did she ask for a piece of my information that I felt was intrusive or susceptible to leading to identity theft, and she wasn't eager to get me to send her a check for anything. She conducted things in a very open-book way and gave me plenty of information about herself (all of which I was able to confirm on my end). On top of it all, the friend I asked to scope out the place said that she herself would have loved to live there (we have pretty similar taste), and she already lives very close by so was able to give me the skinny on the area. I was also able to verify that the house I'm renting has had only a few tenants in the last decade or so: people seemed, in other words, to rent it very quickly and then stay for a very long time (the current tenants lived there for three years and only decided to move because they had to leave the state). I should mention also that she used a verifiable service with a good BBB reputation--Tenant Verification Services, which landlords actually have to register to use--to screen me: the application she sent me to peruse before I'd even decided I wanted the place came directly from TVS (it wasn't just a form made up in MSWord or anything). Good luck!

I'm a MAJOR novice--indeed, a pre-novice--so take this for whatever it's worth, but I actually disagree with the above. To me, it seems funky to ask about vacations before starting the semester ... it feels as though you're already thinking of your next shot outta there before you've even arrived, you know? And since you haven't built up a rapport with your advisor (I'm guessing?), you can't be sure if s/he'll understand that this is coming from a financial perspective or if s/he will think that you already can't wait to go on vacation. I'd advise against. And maybe I'm being thoroughly dense, but one other question--wouldn't you be stuck with one one-way ticket either way? If you bought a round-trip to and from your university, wouldn't you then have to buy a one-way back to your university for after vacation?

Like fuzzylogician said, I think this one is turn-around-able. I'd write her back thanking her for her response, stating that I appreciate her candor and understand her reservations (which it sounds like you do!), apologizing for my past performance in this regard, and promising to rectify this aspect of my academic behavior. Then, of course, you're going to want to actually rectify this aspect of your academic behavior. I haven't been to grad school yet (entering Fall 2012), but I get the sense that it's all about growing in a million ways--if you can show, from this point forward, that this is one area in which you've grown, I imagine that would go a long way toward future recommendations.

Chime. I said basically this same thing on our thread about this article over in the Lit forum. (Ed. because on my first try I did something weird with the quote function)

The author writes that on this "awful grad school admissions site," "the ivory tower morphs from a reassuring backup plan into a source of social and existential terror." If somehow--after the colossal swarm of IHE and CHE articles about why not to go to grad school and about how grad school is not an escape from the universe (to name a mere few: "Just Don't Go," parts one and two; "The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind"), after the multiple "So you want to be a PhD in the ..." shorts, and so on--this person truly still managed to believe that grad school is "a way of opting out of the endless search or a better job," that academia is "[a]iry" and will "save" her "from the grind," that schools are "magic citadels where you can weather the recession" (does she read the news? ever? it feels like every second I read something about some program being slashed somewhere), then I would say that in destroying these illusions, these forums probably gave her exactly what she needed to hear. If this site really was the first thing that showed her that grad school is not "a reassuring backup plan," more power to this site. She writes: "In my alternate life, I am applying to grad school. Not so much to individual programs as to a singular gleaming citadel called Grad School that perches above the workaday world, winking at passersby...In real life, of course, I have a job that I like and a professional future I’m pursuing avidly. But Grad School represents the life of the mind. It makes worries about grown-up responsibilities like money and promotions and rent melt away. And for a lot of twentysomethings, it’s a safety valve as well as a fantasy destination." And again I repeat: seriously, if this site was the first thing that taught her that grad school won't cause money and its associated responsibilities to cease to exist, that grad school does entail a "workaday world" (what on earth doesn't?), three thousand cheers for this site. Further, if she truly got to whatever age she is believing that "crummy real-world concerns" are only relevant to "post-college life" (as opposed to simply "life"), she should consider herself very fortunate. I'm mortified. Not because I use this site, but because this writer has termed herself a spokeswoman for the "twentysomethings" who are interested in grad school, a category in which I fall.