thestage

I've looked at Austin, but I'm a little worried by how fractured their program seems. They look like they really want to partition you off into a rigid specialty right away.

I didn't take this particular test, but I will say that I had the exact same feelings as you guys after the one I took last year. I felt like the test artfully dodged everything I knew and everything I had studied, and I felt like I completely bombed it. I ended up scoring worse than the couple practice tests I took, but I still got a 660, which was 87th percentile at the time (and has since dropped to 85 god damn it all).

I suppose someone should have mentioned that you should have went/should go into this test with a kind of jocular defeatist attitude. you have to know that you will feel like you have failed, because "success" is measured in very different terms from what you are used to. the goal should be to <i>see how much</i> you are able to get, rather than minimize the amount you are not able to get. I don't know why I talk about these tests so much

abstraction and theory in my post about abstraction and theory in defense of the study of abstraction and theory. for shame.

don't leave anything blank. you can always find a way to eliminate one answer, and if you can eliminate one answer then guessing is statistically worth it.

The only reason you even have an idea of what practical means is thanks to the humanities. Your entire frame of reference—including the ideas that “change” is valuable, desirable, and the idea of the import of social significance—comes from what we now call the humanities. Let me try to work by way of analogy—which, you’ll note, is a linguistic device, and thus fair game for the humanities: the JD. What is it? You get to be a lawyer, maybe a judge, a politician? And what will you do—read and write things that will only be read and written by other lawyers, judges, politicians? “Yes, but what they write directly affects the little guy!” Put down the vodka tonic and come back to me, love, we’re not finished. Specialized work is specialized, and if you’ve any thought that the work done by people in any field is for something called “change,” trickles down to the general public, then you simply haven’t been reading your humanities very well. Take a law, or a legal agreement, generally just bureaucratic nonsense, so much obfuscation and red tape, more a hindrance than a help, really. The system perpetuates itself systemically, it alters not just the lawyers into wanting to be lawyers, into existing in enough bulk that we unconsciously, systematically create the work for them to do; no, it also alters you into believing in your heart of hearts that this is for the better, that their work is proper and yours (mine, lets be honest) is not. Plenty of people will tell you all about this, have written marvelous tomes and lurched us forward an inch a decade if we’re lucky, hard work, true work, disastrous, messy, heart-full work. But we can just label it humanities and throw it aside because it doesn’t produce something of commodified value oh wait we’re back in theory again, back in the way humans and their societies operate, back in the structures and presuppositions that the humanities govern. So much work, so little time. If anything in society trickles down, it is not governance, it is not the promise of the explication and avoidance of a system that is propped up in perpetuity by those dangling the strings of escape, and it is certainly not wealth—the answer is knowledge, undistilled and genuine, the product and driving force of a honed and natural curiosity, an incisiveness that can draw upon anything and direct itself anywhere. Systems can be felt out. They can trick or rot or beat down, but the only true way to affect anyone or anything for the better is to do so as a human. And guess who we study! Language. “Big words” that express “little ideas.” Not every scholar is Shakespeare, sometimes they fail or struggle a little, but every one of them operates in a field with terminology, and the idea of terminology is to encapsulate certain known quantities, certain signifieds (or, indeed, certain signifiers) so that everyone isn’t running in a circle unaware of what the other means. Sometimes jargon or form overwhelm the writer or the reader and collapse, great, sometimes cars crash into trees and explode, what are you going to do. You can’t win until you try, and you can’t try until you build a framework willing to support the effort. I get it, sometimes you read about the movement of a sentence in a 17th century French play you’ve never heard of and it’s three in the morning and you start to daydream about what it would be like to wake up one day in 2032 and realize that all of a sudden that’s you, that the play itself could burn tomorrow and the kids in Africa are still dying and the students in row three are still using their terrible brains to stumble into ways to de-legitimize the entire enterprise you’ve submitted yourself to. Well, that’s not just life, but your shitty situation is in fact one of the few capable of producing a third of a ticket out, because the second you see the system around you, you have some license to poke around at its edges, see how it works—and hell, that French play, the words you wrote about it, read about it, the methods you used and created, the fact that you’ll think and talk about these things, these structural things, the machinations of human thought and experience—that’ll you’ll engage them every day you’re willing, that’ll all come into play. And now you’re prepared for another direction. Because human intellect and work are not zero-sum games, you aren’t compartmentalized, you don’t start over. It’s an endless, endless horizon, that of human experience and creation, and I promise it’ll only work out for you the second you want it to. Take it from me, I mean this to be nice, lord knows it’s rare enough: if you aren’t happy doing this, you won’t be happy doing that either, whatever “that” might be. As much as I do not believe society as it exists is something we should even be bothering to benefit, seeing as it has no desire to benefit any of what you might try to define as “us,” unless “us” is “rich white people,” the only way to benefit it as an individual, on an individual level (the only level), is to be happy and content and quite alright with the boundaries that define who you are. One more sodding JD who has tricked herself into thinking that tricking people that are not herself into thinking that she’s worth it will make her worth it doesn’t have anything on the poor English sap reading his books and genuinely believing that someone somewhere once wrote something that was worth preserving, that might in some way provide a scrap of what it means to be human. If you think academics is supposed to be about however you define change, and if you think that your “pointless analysis” is only ever worth doing because it proves that you are alive and better than someone else, then you’re doing it wrong. And not “doing it wrong” because you’d be the only one in that club—no, there are quite a large barrel full of You at every school in the world, believe it—but because this talk of “change” and “practicality” and “usefulness” and “determination” to hold this or that series of letters after your name is endemic, it is socially inscribed, it is everywhere, it is indicative of the kind of social loss that one might find a home investigating in the humanities from any number of perspectives, including new ones. If you’re looking to see the tricks and falseness and the “success” here you will also see it there, because the problem isn’t us or them, it’s you. I’m done apologizing. Save it for the people who created the culture that expects it. Irony. You're not helping.

The practice stuff is a good way to adjust your approach. Many of the verbal questions are in forms that allow for multiple reasonably correct readings, and if you're smart enough to understand the assumptions behind each of those possible answers, you can trick yourself into either of them. If you choose one particular answering philosophy to apply to the actual test and it happens to be the wrong one, congratulations, you just bombed a test you shouldn't have. This was my experience, at any rate. Note, however, that I never took an official practice test, I just did all the example stuff on the ETS site (they actually have quite a bit) and a couple of things elsewhere. I kept performing somewhere between 'reasonably poor' and 'awful,' so I showed up to the test somewhat concerned. I got a perfect score. So forget about the actual answers on the practice stuff, just investigate the methodology used in the questions. Read the explanations on the answer sheets. They will help you decide between two or more answers that are reasonable.

Everyone seems pretty angry. I looked at a couple places last year. Then I ran into statements like "12,000 GBP a semester" and "see these pretty pictures? you will never be here, kill yourself"

Well, at least you can get them. I spent a semester at a community college a decade ago, and this will mark the third time I've had to fight them over the phone to find someone competent enough to discover my transcript. The first time (when I attempted to transfer as an undergrad), they promptly failed to send them out anyway.

How'd you manage to swing that?

you really should have just tried. some schools say that they view a huge discrepancy between verbal and quantitative like that in a negative light, others use combined scores as a funding cut-off line, and I'm sure more still mean what they don't say. at any rate, how does it look to an admin committee to see someone simply not bother to try on something that takes ninety minutes of their time? the test itself is a joke, I got 65th percentile (not great, sure, but it won't sound any alarms) and I hadn't taken a math class in nine years at the time of the test. I applied no formulas or any other specialized knowledge (and I use this term loosely) to any question. frankly, I was rather embarrassed that I was able to do as well as I did.

I don't know how you people afford the ridiculous prices these UK schools charge for their degrees

As dumb as this is, it sure would help me! And Buffalo might be my top choice, as well

The GRE lit test is really dumb. This means you can game it if you are a good test taker and feel like spending the time to stoop to its levels. If you are not a good test taker you will not do well unless you have been steeped in (not just read) an unnatural amount of literature. There is not much middle ground, as far as I see it. My preparation was slightly above minimal and I got 87% percentile. Then again, I'm an excellent test taker and 87% percentile is literally the worst standardized test score I've ever gotten. It's not an easy test. You have to play defensively, so to speak. Here's a small tip that is of some actual use: I took three practice tests, one as the result of idle curiosity long before I even decided I was going to apply to grad school and two for real. I scored better on the test I actually took than I did on the first of those practice tests, but worse than I did on the other two. I wanted to know why, in general terms. Now, I do think the real test that I took was "harder" or less tailored to my knowledge and my studying than the other tests, and I do believe this played a role, but the main point is that I did not finish the real test in time, while I finished the other three with somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to spare. The reason? In the practice tests, I wrote the letter of the answer down on a separate sheet of paper; on the actual test, you are bubbling. Bubbling takes more time than writing "A." There are 230 questions. So when you practice, bubble. Other than that, standard test taking measures apply--skip, guess, don't get flustered, look for ways in which a question undermines itself, play the logic, assume the answers are more obvious authors rather than more obscure ones when you are debating between options. Know the characteristics of eras and movements so you can recognize them whether or not you recognize a specific author or text. Read wiki summaries and character lists of longer works that you feel are important (ie, Victorian novels), make sure you can read and recognize The Canterbury Tales, for fuck's sake don't ignore the non-Shakespeare, non-Milton 17th century, assume any passage with questions of grammar or syntax is from Milton unless you have good reason to believe otherwise, know poetic forms and genres (no, really: know them, be able to recognize them very quickly, and not just to be able to answer "what form is this in" but to be able to recognize that a passage is from The Divine Comedy or The Faerie Queene without even reading it or knowing anything about the texts at all just because you saw Terza Rima or a Spensarian Stanza (shame on you, you should read Dante anyway)), Charles Lamb will appear for some reason, there will be at least three passages identifiable as mock epic and about 40 questions with something related to mock epic as a possible answer, I swear Borges showed up on all my practice tests but not on the real one, fuck Samson Agonistes, people tell you the grammar questions are supposed to be free points but in actuality most of them are really hard, read The Rape of the Lock, I hope you've read Paradise Lost, if I had to recommend one book-length work to read in total with the specific aim of assisting you on this test and I can't pick Paradise Lost I'd actually pick Ovid's Metamorphoses. Umm you will run into shit that you've never even considered hearing of. don't sweat it.

read: we want people upon whom we can impress our ideology so that it does not die in the next generation and take us with it political science. makes sense.

For those worried about the lack of a proper writing sample: even if you will be busy in the fall with your undergraduate work, you have an entire summer between now and then to work (after an unmitigated failure of an application season, I will be joining you). If you can't write a good paper in that time frame, you probably aren't ready anyway. Length is not even particularly a factor; you can write a twenty page paper in a week or less. If you haven't done that yet, you certainly will at some point in the future. What matters for <i>this</i> paper is the time spent researching and thinking and organizing, which will absolutely dwarf the time spent writing to the point where the latter interval will seem trivial.

definitely declined this before they even had time to send the email

There is a difference between reading for reading's sake, and reading to find something you can latch onto in an SOP. One is sycophantic; the other is not. Hell, one may even be academically dishonest. But what I'm talking about is time: no matter who we are or how much we want to get into grad school, we are only going to budget so much time for our applications. I'd rather spend as little of it chasing ghosts as possible.

The point is you cannot control the situation really at all. Looking at a blurb on a website doesn't tell you anything about a professor, and reading articles by them is an immense investment of time. Wouldn't you rather spend your academic time, I don't know, learning something, or improving yourself instead of figuring out who you can suck up to in three sentences in fifteen different applications? Especially when that one professor you found after hours of reading and guessing is, shucks, going on leave, or already has 4 students, or is moving schools, or maybe is just turned off by the way you used the word "conversation" instead of "discourse" in your fourth paragraph? And won't it just be cute when you get accepted and then the professors tell you "lol you aren't going to study that anyway " The process can be over thought. As I type this there is a thread on the front page from a guy thinking about how he might, maybe look into Milton and some huge swath of post Miltonic poets spaning a time period of 125 years, and he's not sure which school to go to because he doesn't at all know where his interests would fit in. Poor guy, he's screwed--oh wait, he's trying to decide which offer to accept between Harvard and Princeton. One of the regulars here (I don't recall which) went 0-fer-a-lot and then got into Columbia--when questioned on her field, she said she wasn't really sure. I mean. Write a really good paper and hope you get lucky. If you can bullshit your way to a fit statement based on a website, it probably can't hurt, but something tells me your writing sample isn't going to be all things to all people, and no website is going to say "this year Professor X wants a student interested in the aesthetics of late 19th century Irish poets in relation to British occupation as seen through the lens of Hegel."

What no one is talking about is time: namely, ascertaining what every professor at every school is interested in, good at, and what they have done lately is a spectacular waste of it.

Less of a problem if your undergrad school doesn't actually have access to anything! But there are a ton of public libraries with respectable database access at least, and I hear most of them also carry books.

You probably shouldn't burn books

I think I should quote this so that people don't hate me, because I don't know what it has to do with any of what I've said. "Elitist" was your term, not mine, and I only assented to it in a very strict sense; namely, only a small section of the populace are MA holders (cursory research: somewhere between 5 and 10%). I also said that not everyone has the aptitude to earn an MA, which I guess might be the point of contention here? Look, I too lament the disappearance of, say, literary criticism and theory for the masses, or at least literary criticism and theory that is discussed by people and sources that are for the masses--but I also won't say that this is entirely the fault of the producers of literary criticism, and I also won't apologize for, say, academic language in academic texts or the like. I'm not sure where you think I "dismiss popular appeal," but I guess it either comes down to my claims regarding the ability of people to earn an MA, or to where I said the MA comes with "the(popular) stain of academia." As far as the first claim is concerned, I'm not saying that people without MAs aren't as smart as people with MAs, I'm saying that people with them are smarter than those without them--the difference is merely one of numbers: you can very obviously be smarter than your statistically average person and not have an MA (you can be the smartest person in the world, whatever that means, and not have an MA), whereas it is very unlikely that you will have an MA and possess less intelligence than your statistically average person. By my later statement I only mean that possessing an MA leads one to be placed in a cognitive category that is very different from possessing a BA, and that category comes with a lot of assumptions that are negative or antagonistic for a lot of people.

I'd also like to add that the $50k a year thing is bogus. I don't care if the school thinks the educational opportunity provided by an admission is theoretically worth 25k a year in and of itself, because it flatly is not. If it were, they'd charge the price and people would pay. The only things actually attached to that nebulous dollar sign from the perspective of a school are the time of the professors that teach graduate classes and advise dissertation writers--and considering their salaries it sure as hell doesn't add up to $25k a year per student (to say nothing of the professors themselves, who may or may not feel like they personally and/or professionally derive some benefit from the work they do with graduate students, or of other things tied to their jobs and thus their salaries, such as the research work they do, or the teaching of undergraduate classes)--and possibly some amount related to the money sunk into libraries and the like. As it stands, they pay us instead because they realize two things: 1. Graduate students actually have to eat food or they die. 2. Some combination of producing a PhD holder and producing the research accomplished by a PhD holder is of economic value to the University. The "tuition remission" thing is a joke. What are they remitting if no one ever actually pays? I would be excited and honored to be accepted by and attend a school, and to work toward a PhD, but I'm not going to starry-eyes it and relinquish all self-worth to bow before the institution or the profession. For the prevalence of marx and marx derived thinking in the humanities, you'd think I wouldn't be alone in this.

1. Tough to decline zero offers! 2. You're arguing for me, not against me. It's not like the fact that PhD stipends are barely above the poverty line, and that job placement is pretty bad in general and completely awful when compared to the work required of the degree is some line of argument I'm hearing here for the first time. One of the predominant lines of thought in this thread (and one evinced by the post I quoted) is "well, the greater employment picture is so bad, and intellect is valued so little, that, if nothing else, going to grad school offers assurance that I'm at least not going to die of starvation or whittle my brain away to nothing in the next six years." That is, you'll note, largely an "externally economic" line of thinking, and I think you'd either have to be insane, a clinical optimist, or an undergrad freshman to not find a note of despair in there. Someone else mentioned that even professors, among them ones that don't at all regret their decision, are strongly urging people to stay away from grad school (and by association, the profession tied to it) under most any circumstance. According to you, I guess they should resign. The point here is that the situation is not fantastic, and that prospective grad students and prospective professional academics have a tendency to romanticize their circumstances and readily assume the mantle of the victim, neither of which strike me as particularly ideal, and both of which speak to problems inside and outside the academy. But I've said this all here before, and none of it is new to anyone anyway.