antecedent

Last time I checked, "bajillion" wasn't a real number, so you'll have to excuse my skepticism. And thank you for your good wishes, I am very excited about starting my masters in the fall

Haha well, I'd be less concerned about trolling gradcafe and more concerned about my reading comprehension if I were you.

I'm so glad to hear someone else has experienced this!!

I received information about obtaining a visa (that I don't actually need) from the university, but nothing at all from the department. The silence is definitey irksome.

Ahahaha this is the part that made me laugh. Sure you did, Grapefruits, that's really nice of you to share with us too.

Just sent you a PM!

Unconditional just means you've met all the requirements already - you don't have any courses to finish up, final grades to submit etc.

Totally! I found it refreshing after the "don't go to grad school OR YOU'LL DIE. Or worse, be poor" articles that get more attention. It's by no means good news, but it's practical, which is really what we need if we're already sold on this whole grad school thing. I know a couple PhDs who work the 9-5 schedule pretty well. I think it gets easier once you're out of coursework and on to the dissertation, though.

This came my way through the twitter-tubes, and I thought some people here might find it interesting. It reflects a lot of the conversations we've had about our motivations to attend grad school and the plans afterwards. http://www.hookandeye.ca/2011/11/degree-is-job-modest-proposal-for-phd.html

That's exactly what I thought! I was like "dude, I correctly defined that in the Linguistics forum less than a month ago. CLEARLY someone hasn't done her due diligence."

I don't understand your comment here, ComeBackZinc. Is it because "bloggers" (or whatever this woman calls herself) are writing about GradCafe in a public forum? GradCafe itself is public, so I imagine that anyone who was riled up by that article would already know about GradCafe and be concerned. Certainly we've already established that there are profs, adcoms, and DGSs that are aware of the site's existence. Also, can someone still be a troll if they're not directly trolling the community? I think Katy Waldman might count in that case. In fact, I would argue that at this point, anyone flogging the "academia is hard to get into AND there are no jobs after so you just shouldn't go" horse at this point needs to be kicked to the troll category and ignored. Can't they all go back to worrying about Global Warming or Facebook privacy or something?

Also, I'm curious about what kind of score would qualify me for having to retake the Lit GRE. I did pretty badly, but I think I was above the 50th percentile (yeah I just checked - I was in the 66th percentile, cringe). I genuinely though no one would care about that score, but now this forum is making me nervous. My verbal score was acceptably high, and my AW was decent, though my quant was the pits. Maybe having good regular scores will make up for my fail-tastic lit GRE?

Hey, uh, CONGRATULATIONS! But yeah, that's hilarious timing. Well done!

I want to do it to deny potential law students a spot in academia (get outta my seat, bitch).

I find I'm very bad at identifying what's a trend and what's the evolution of the field. I also tend to like very untrendy things (authorial intent, George Orwell, prescriptive grammar), which puts me at a bit of a disadvantage for grad apps sometimes. I think I tried to make my application more appealing this time around by tailoring it to current trends in sociolinguistics, and that blew up in my face. Next time around, I'm definitely sticking to my backwards, untrendy guns.

And here I thought it was just a bunch of atheists being ironic. Huh.

Man, it's so great to look at the Final Decision google doc. It makes me happy to see so many great people going to great schools. And it's inspiration for application seasons to come! Big hugs and high fives all around. [edit]: There are a couple people not on there that I'm really curious about. Anyone heard where koolherc or Origin=Goal decided to go? I seem to remember both having great admits.

antecedant: one of my favorite linguistic concepts - part of the syntax/semantics interface that is just TOO COOL. George Orwell: I wrote my senior honours thesis on the man and haven't been able to let go of my literary crush since.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, from you and Stately Plump! I will most definitely be soliciting example SOPs next year - I think part of my problem is I drastically misunderstood the point of the SOP at the time. I plan on reading a bunch (hopefully some successful ones!) to get an idea of what I'm aiming for.

This is going to be a huge factor when I apply for PhDs. Not only is my family spread out across two continents, but my SO is likely Canada-bound unless we get married, so being able to see each other easily is a big part of my LDR survival strategy. In fact that was one point against UW Madison - the closest international airport is in Milwaukee or Chicago. Taking a two hour bus to an airplane doesn't count as "close" to me. Austin, on the other hand, does have an international airport

Well, the University of Oregon English department has a Rhet/Comp field for the PhD, though I'm not sure if it qualifies as BAMF-y (what say you, PNW-ers?). They also are home to the Kenneth Burke Bibliography and Archival Project: http://pages.uoregon.edu/engl/people/faculty/rhetcomp/

That'll be me in 2014. Good luck Rainy!

Yay Trip! Good for you.You're gonna do amazing - this was an option where you got to live with your SO right? Congrats on that too! Everytime someone on this board successfully navigates that issue for another 5 years get a little more hopeful

Congratulations Jon! Yeah scholarships are key with Edinburgh, eh? Did you manage to apply for the Global/Santader scholarships or did you miss those deadlines?They were right as you were accepting. Have you found any other good ones? I'll be applying for the Saltire and then another Linguistics-specific bursary. I reeaaaaally hope I get one, preferably more! Tuition at Edinburgh is steep! (Though, to be fair, not much more expensive than a year at UW-Madison, one of my other admits, and that's a two year program.) I'm super excited about the year at Edinburgh, and the boost it will give to my PhD applications next time around. Yay Scotland!