marlowe

HOLY SHIT, GUYS! I am in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am going to get a PhD. Thank the lord. Soooooooooo excited.

I think it is important to point out that these admissions committees are not meeting every day!

We may sit here fretting over every day that passes without notification, but if the committee is only meeting once every three weeks, it makes a lot of sense to release their notifications periodically.

I think it is important to point out that these admissions committees are not meeting every day!

We may sit here fretting over every day that passes without notification, but if the committee is only meeting once every three weeks, it makes a lot of sense to release their notifications periodically.

Just got my first acceptance! Wow, I had no idea it would feel this good. Good luck to all my other buddies out here!

lol yeah, i guess so. my brain wasn't really functioning properly when i sent that out earlier. sorry!

That is my preferred musical generation: Joni, James, Carole, CSNY, the Dead.

This is the most controversial question, it seems, in discussing applying to grad school online.

I'll say this: it's impossible to make a rule about this. A lot of people tend to want to look at their own experience and pronounce that as best practice. (That's a temptation I have to fight myself.) To me, the details are essential. Cold emailing somebody and attempting to ingratiate yourself with them for a slot in a grad program could easily be a disaster. But it's also simply the case: there's no competitive human endeavor where social factors and networking don't play a part. Who you know matters in applying for a job, and it certainly matters in grad school applications writ large. It's not a crude or malicious situation where unqualified people jump the line because they have a personal connection to a prof. It's the simple fact that in a brutally competitive environment, programs are choosing between hundreds of super-qualified applicants. And academia is a small, small world, particularly in some fields. And that isn't less true at the most competitive programs; in fact it's likely most true in those situations.

There's plenty of people who get in without making contact; there's plenty of people who will tell you it was key to their success. Just another complicated question in an often obscure and arbitrary process.

Congrats, Pinkrobot. Penn is an awesome program.

MY BAD! Didn't mean to cause any unnecessary anxiety!!! Apologies.

I wrote up an exhaustive--and exhausting--list of questions before my visit last year and am pasting it below. Keep in mind that encoded within these questions are assumptions and preferences that are likely specific to me and what I was looking for. Also, though I asked many of these questions during my visits, I also found that, in the scheme of things, most of these questions--or, I should say, most of the answers--didn't really matter in my decision-making process. In much the same way that stats tell you something, but not necessarily something useful, about what programs are looking for and what your fellow applicants are like, these questions often tell you structural things about a department but not what it actually feels like to be there. Everyone's mileage will vary, of course, but I found myself not caring if, say, prelims were written or oral (though I had a preference) if everything else about the program was appealing. In the end, if it's a program you love, you'll jump through whatever hoops it presents. I highly recommend visiting schools, as there were programs at which my instinctive reaction told me everything I needed to know after about 5 minutes of being there. Additionally, visiting schools lets you make contact with people who will be important to your work regardless if you end up working with them directly. Good luck! It's an exciting, if unnerving time, and as difficult as it was last year to weigh the options, I found myself missing the sense of possibility after I had made a decision that I was (and am) very happy with.


-PLACES TO STUDY AND WORK
-Where do most people do their writing and reading?
-What study spaces are available? Do students get a carrel? Do those who teach get or share an office?

-LIBRARY
-What is the library system like? Are the stacks open or closed?
-What are the library hours?
-Are there specialized archives/primary sources that would be useful to my research?
-Are there specialist librarians who can help me with my research?

-FACULTY
-Are the faculty members I want to work with accepting new students? Are any of those faculty members due for a sabbatical any time soon?
-Are professors willing to engage you on a personal level rather than just talking about your work?
-Are there any new professors the department is hiring in areas that align with my interests?
-Students’ relationships with their professors – are they primarily professional, or are they social as well?

-FUNDING
-Is funding competitive? If so, do students feel a distinction between those who have received more generous funding and those who haven’t?
-How does funding break down among the cohort? i.e., how many people receive fellowships?
-How, if you don’t have much savings, do you make enough money to live comfortably?
-Are there external fellowships one can apply to? If so, what is available? Does the program help you apply for these fellowships? How does receiving an external fellowship affect internal funding?
-If people need more than five/six years to finish, what funding resources are available? (For instance, Columbia can give you an additional 2-year teaching appointment.)
-Do you provide funding for conferences or research trips?
-How often is funding disbursed? (i.e., do you get paid monthly or do you have to stretch a sum over a longer period of time?)

-COHORT
-Do students get along with each other? Is the feeling of the program more collaborative than competitive?
-Do students in different years of the program collaborate with each other, or are individual cohorts cliquey?
-How many offers are given out, and what is the target number of members for an entering class?
-Ages/marital status of people in the cohort – do most people tend to be married with families? Are there younger people? Single people? What sense do you have of how the graduate students interact with each other socially?
-Do people seem happy? If they’re stressed, is it because they’re busy or is it because they’re anxious/depressed/cynical/disillusioned?
-Is the grad secretary/program administrator nice?
-What is the typical time to completion? What are the factors that slow down or speed up that time?
-I’ve read that there are two kinds of attrition: “good” attrition, in which people realize that the program, or graduate study, isn’t right for them and leave early on, and “bad” attrition, in which people don’t finish the dissertation. What can you tell me about the rates of each, and of the reasons why people have chosen to leave the program?

-JOB MARKET/PROFESSIONALIZATION
-What is the placement rate? How many of those jobs are tenure-track?
-What are examples of institutions in which people in my field have been placed?
-How does the department prepare you for the job search? Are there mock interviews and mock job talks?
-Are the people helping you navigate the job search people who have recently gone through the process themselves?
-If you don’t get placed, is there anything the department can do for you? (e.g., can you stay an extra year?)
-How does the department prepare you for and help you attain conference presentations and publications?

-SUMMER WORK
-What is encouraged/required?
-If there separate funding/is the year-round funding enough to live on during the summer?
-Do people find themselves needing to get outside work during the summer in order to have enough money?
-Am I expected to stay in town in the summer, and what happens if I don’t?

-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT
-What is done to help people who don’t have language proficiency attain it? Does the university provide funding?
-What is the requirement, and by when do you have to meet it?
-Given my research interests, what languages should I study?
-When do you recommend doing the work necessary to fulfill the language requirement? (i.e., summer before first year, summer after first year, while taking classes, etc.)

-LOCATION REQUIREMENTS
-How long are students required to be in residence?
-How many students stay in the location for the duration of the program? (i.e., how many dissertate in residence?)
-How is funding affected if you don’t stay?

-Incompletes on papers at the end of the term: What is the policy, how many students take them, and how does this affect progress through the program?

-TEACHING
-What sort of training is provided?
-What types of courses do people teach?
-Does teaching entail serving as a grader? Serving as a TA? Developing and teaching a section of comp?
-How are students placed as TAs? Is there choice about what classes you teach and which professors you work with? Do classes correspond to your field?
-How many courses do you teach per semester/year?
-How many students are in your classes?
-How does the school see teaching as fitting in with the other responsibilities/requirements of graduate study?
-How do students balance teaching with their own work?
-Is the department more concerned with training you as a teacher/professor or with having cheap labor to teach their classes?
-How, if at all, does the economic downturn affect teaching load/class sizes?
-What are the students like? Can I sit in on a course a TA teaches to get a sense of them?

-METHODOLOGY
-Is a theory course required?
-What methodology do most people use?
-Where, methodologically, do you see the department – and the discipline – heading?
-Is interdisciplinarity encouraged, and what sorts of collaboration have students undertaken?

-Typical graduate class and seminar sizes

-What should I do to prepare over the summer?

-Ask people I know: What are the questions – both about the program itself and about the location – I should ask that will most help me get a feel for whether this is the right program for me?

-Ask people I know: What do you wish you knew or wish you had asked before choosing a program?

-Is the school on the semester or the quarter system, and how does that affect classes/teaching/requirements?

-What is the course load for each semester, and how many courses are required?

-What kind of support is provided while writing the dissertation? I worry about the isolation and anxiety of writing such a big project. What does the program do to help you break the dissertation down into manageable pieces, and to make the experience less isolating?

-What do writing assignments look like in classes? Do they differ based on the type/level of class and/or based on whether you intend to specialize in the field?

-Ask professors: what have you been working on lately?

-Ask professors: What is your approach to mentoring and advising graduate students?

-How long are class meetings?

-How often do professors teach graduate courses?

-Are course schedules available for future semesters (10-11, etc.)?

-Can I see the grad student handbook? Are there any other departmental documents – such as reports on the program prepared for accreditation – that I can see?


-QUALITY OF LIFE
-Prices – how does the cost of gas, milk, cereal, etc. compare to other places I've lived in?
-Cost and quality of typical one-bedroom apartment.
-What does the university do to provide you with or help you find housing?
-When (i.e., what month) do people start looking for an apartment for the fall, and where do they look?
-Is it easy to find a summer subletter?
-How close to campus can—and should—one live?
-What grocery stores are there in town?
-How late are cafes, bookstores, malls, restaurants typically open?
-What do people do to make extra money?
-Does the town have more of a driving or a walking culture? What is parking like near campus (availability, ease, cost)?
-Where do most English grad students live? Most other grad students? Most professors? Where is the student ghetto? Do most students live near each other, or are they spread out far and wide?
-How far does the stipend go in this location?

It is NORTHWESTERN DAY!

(as in last year, today was Northwestern Day). We need to rush the "Chat Room" en masse when shit starts going down.

I don't post very often, but I seriously compulsively check this site at work and at home every 15 minutes or so. (I've gotten very good at surreptitiously sneaking a peak at updates while my boss's back is turned -- we share an office -- and my husband pretty much thinks I have an unhealthy addiction to this site, which he does not at all understand -- "It's not like you're going to find anything out about your application. Why would you check GradCafe more than once a day/week/month??"). Anyway, my point is that, while you all may not know me very well (due to my lack of prolific posting), I feel very familiar with all of you, and I am seriously miserable that you are getting rejections already. You guys are my friends/support group/inspriation! I have such a hard time believing that some of you will not get in somewhere, however, so don't get too down just yet. My one waitlist (closest thing I ever had to an acceptance) in the way-too-long history of my applications to grad school came in late March -- which felt like a miserably long time to wait for a few weeks of antsy-half-happiness -- but hopefully that means that, in spite of whatever kind of control over our destinies we hope to gain by compulsively analyzing the results board, it's not over until you have an answer in hand from every single program! Don't let one get you too down (yet) We will all get through this (with our drinks of choice, varied Netflix addictions, and our fellow GCers)

Forgive me, for I don't want to attack you, but this is dead wrong. And this attitude is one of the reasons why the humanities have been dying. The humanities disciplines offer MUCH more than "knowledge…for its own sake" and engender in students many more useful and--dare I say it--profitable skills than they are given credit for. Yet, so many humanities scholars, students and teachers alike, seem perfectly content to lament a culture where knowledge and education are not valued as much as they should be without doing anything about it. I find the American culture of ignorance as troubling as the next scholar, but part of the problem is that we have allowed those ignorance-mongers to define the conversation for far too long and have, as a result, allowed our disciplines to die. The humanities provide an education that is incredibly useful many different kinds of disciplines, workplaces, and fields (up to and including business, science—though of course not the actual research and technical-skills-requiring parts, and new technologies). Humanists really need to learn to market themselves better both to employers and to the general public. Honestly, this kind of marketing is not hard to do—I did it once upon a time with my humanities major before I decided to go to grad school and managed to do fairly well in the business arena despite my total lack of know-how in that field. As with almost any job, 95% of it is learned as you go, and humanities backgrounds actually prepare a person better, in many ways, for that on-the-fly manner of acquiring skills than do the disciplines (such as business) that are directly related to those fields. It’s not only on the job market, however, though change begins at the micro level, and more employers being shown and told how great humanities students are as employees would help shape general public opinion. But we also need to be more vocal in the public arena about how valuable the humanities are. We need to learn to articulate our own value in comprehensible ways, and we need to DO it instead of moaning about how no one appreciates us. Of course no one appreciates us if we don’t make it clear in every way and space that we can that the humanities are good for our communities and profit margins alike. If we simply cry to each other about how crappy it is, that does nothing. Take back the conversation in the public sphere. Learn how to craft a compelling resume for the worlds of business and industry. And do not keep repeating the LIE that the humanities have nothing to offer but abstract, highbrow knowledge. While there is nothing wrong with knowledge for its own sake—lord knows I would love to see our country appreciate it more—we need to learn how to show all the other things we can do. Which is a LOT. We have just been told and taught by so many people that we cannot do anything but think. So, let’s THINK about ways to motherfucking fix it. Market, spin, and have results to show for it. Honestly—these things are what the humanities teach us to do in the first place. Let’s do it.

Sorry, thestage. Didn't mean to sound like I was going after you specifically. I am just sick of these kinds of comments. What you say is not all wrong--the class issues and absurd emphasis on bottom-line results are real, significant problems. But so is the defeatist attitude that too many humanities students, teachers, and grads cultivate like gangbusters.

Edit: Also, did not realize how long this was until I posted. Sorry! I've been lesson planning for hours, which always includes me having to justify why learning about literature is important to my students, so I'm a bit touchy and, apparently, long-winded at the moment.

I sort of missed the boat on the drink of choice discussion, but with rejections starting to pop up on the results board, I figured a revival of that discussion wouldn't be too ill-timed.

My one-and-only drink of chocie is beer, but there are so many to choose from that I never want for variety. I mostly prefer American ales (I can't stand most lagers, and the wheat beer that makes me happy is a rare exception). Favorite major breweries: Stone, Rogue, Sierra Nevada, Firestone, and Lagunitas -- but I'm lucky to be fairly close to some fairly wonderful local breweries as well. I'll have something this weekend and drink to all of you -- here's to very few rejections for GCers!

I don't know if that was aimed at me, but I don't think it's very meaningful: obviously, originality can't exist in a vacuum. Our ideas are formed by a multitude of influences, some too subtle to discern clearly. I just think that "molded" is a strong word to use in this context. Remember, I come from the British system, which typically involves a much more independent style of learning.

I have no problem satisfying my professors, but I absolutely disagree about your characterisation of the purpose of writing. You seem to suggest that artistry and satisfying professors are mutually exclusive. I don't write for approval. My writing gains approval, and it needs to, but that is not my prime motivation. I'm not striving for a brilliant career as an end in itself, but rather as something that will enable me to pursue those goals that go beyond that constant striving for approval.

I hope that made sense. I may have misinterpreted your post. I was a little offended by it.

I think this attitude is not what the English grad programs want to see. I've heard so many English PhD students complaining that they're treated like little kids by their professors or supervisors. Applicants already with an MA may indicate that they have already been molded into a certain literary position, so it's hard to tailor their research interests to those of their supervisors, on which a large part of their success in an English PhD program depends on. Some complain that it's like writing a dissertation to meet the interests of their supervisors. Some people can't do this and so leave. Some are better at this, who often turn out to be young students who enter the program with only BAs. Well, this is just my theory.

It just comes down to the fact that lit people often don't want to teach comp, and comp/rhet people find fulfillment in exactly that.

That is exactly what the chat thread is for!

Generally, public or state schools which heavily depend on graduate students for undergraduate teaching will look at you favorably, but you won't impress any top schools (the Ivy league & others like Stanford), especially with your community college teaching experience. The tops schools often hire lecturers with PhDs. They won't let their graduate students teach until they pass the prelims or become ABDs.

"every five or so minutes." That's me.

Last Friday night, after a few too many tequila shots, I begged a friend to let me use his computer just so I could check the results and my e-mail. I had a small meltdown because of one of the inevitable Friday evening "Duke Application Status" e-mails.

There is a good chance I will not even hear from anyone for another month. That makes the chances of my sanity not lasting through the month exponentially higher. Find a math major. Figure that out.

Ready for this? I'm gonna get accepted to both programs with full funding. Then I'll have to spend a few glorious days re-visiting both campuses and programs, counting up my options, making a Pros and Cons chart, and having all the power over my app season, for once. Mwahahahaha!

I will say, however, that knowing that acceptance calls went out - and that I did not receive one - did prepare me well for the eventual rejection.

The worst that they could say is either "no", or "your application is no longer under consideration". I would go for it!

Alright, who are the biggest bosses in literary history that were over-shadowed by their more famous relations?

I am going to go with Leonard Woolf and Branwell Bronte. Below is Branwell's self-portrait (I've seen it in person - pretty awesome).

And without Canterbury Tales, there would be no Ulysses! Chaucer did more for modern English than arguably any other author.