Jack Cade

My final acceptance has not been made, but I have turned down a funded spot at Fordham. An FYI for anyone interested. Harder than it looked, I may have been entirely wrong to criticize so and so on that other post, at least as harshly as I did. Hmmm... I have been a jerk before.

Oh Jesus. I've got a theory. To anyone who cares to read it. Some on this forum have heard me talk about this before, in person that is. Nobody gets into academia, suffers through the extended period of poverty, a life on hold, the general tedious and tenuous existence of a grad student without a deep emotional need that is being satisfied, or a brainwashing sort of cult thing, but someone already wrote that theory. Now on some level, we pursue this path to do something worthwhile with our lives, something that is deeply enjoyable, something with some eventual financial security, and, more than anything, something that allows us to achieve a significant measure of prestige. It seems to me, from my armchair, that doing something worthwhile as a future goal, doesn't quite sustain one through the travails of the moment, particularly when that consummation is so distant, possibly decades in the future. And as fun as the game is, there is much of it that isn't fun, and there are also plenty of careers which are equally as fun, if not more fun. (And I don't believe anyone does anything strictly for money.) It is the last that seems to me most suspicious. There is so much intellectual prestige to go along with the PhD. So much, 'I am not dumb, see I am a doctor,' to assuage the insecure ego, so much ethos to appease all our little insecurity homunculi, which so many of us seem to have in abundance. What other visceral, persistent, and pervasive motivation can there be to sustain folks through the arduousness of the PhD and job placement journey? So, looking inward, I see my purpose and I see my pride, and I think, humility should be my constant concern. Then I look around and see folks in my game, and think that this might be good advice for lots of people. Clearly the other motivations for our path(s) are more than worthy, and hopefully, ultimately why we are doing this, but those egos of ours, too often close to the surface, surely do have sharp sharp edges on 'em. Humbly for your consideration.

I think your response is interesting, I responded positively to that SoP. Recognizing it as the product of a flawed rhetorical situation (ick), I expect a flawed document. Every SoP I've ever read has been flawed in some way or another. I do, however, entirely agree with your--and others--comments about the nature of SoP writing. It is nice to have an idea of what other's Statements look like, particularly successful ones, but each situation is so different that those SoPs will only be so helpful. Oh and FU man, we're all coming to your house, hahaha, kidding.

Hahahaha and then you go on to reply to my post. Ilikecats, you're silly. I would've expected someone with that screen name to take themselves much less seriously. I love the "littered with grammatical errors" oh you wicked ad homineming, tu quoque immune, grammar Nazi in the informal communication medium of the online forum you! I am so sorry to have wasted your time with my poor use of your English. I do so humbly beg your forgiveness. Oh if only I had language rights too.... Woe is me This is silly. And completely immature, if only our future departments/advisors/mentors could see us now, they'd be so proud. However, this has been well in keeping with the thread's ontology. Of course, it is this esprit de corps which makes so many departments so like a bad soap opera or a good sit com. I feel sorry for OP, sorry I bashed you. I just hoped to make the point about being lucky and privileged to be in their position, and that being sensitive to the feelings of others is an important part of being a good scholar. Those with power need to be wise. Getting called stupid and getting someone all worked up was certainly not my intention. They, OP, seemed likely to have taken the meaning well, but in came ILC... I sincerely apologize to all, and genuinely regret my comments; although not the "ad homineming," that I like; I could do without the sloppy posts, but, I am also not going to read through these twice; oh I do love some of the jokes. :wink: I surrender the field vanquished! Alors, Bon courage.

Yeah, I think I was responding to myself. New rule, only one visit per day. :wink: Ah heck maybe this thread will get some folks moving on and rejecting offers.

It is the attitude which is the same IlikeCats. A sense of entitlement, an ignorance of the suffering of others. I did not "align", btw, I made analogies--one to one situation via metaphor and simile. I am not saying the two positions within the analogy are equivalent only the rough relationship between the two is, and I obviously did it for shock value. Why aren't waitlists capitalism at work? How are they not? They produce a structure to control the applicants (workers), they produce a supply and demand scarcity reinforcing the hegemony of the institution over the applicant, who is in a dependent and precarious state. The institutions keep key information secret, hide the workings of the process, etc, all in an effort to control access to the means of academic production. But, I am no marxist, nor even a post-marxist. I have no idea how that tracks, nice ad hominem attack though, very much not fifth grade, more pubescent teen, below. Marxist or meritocrate? And are you being purposefully obtuse? Or just trying to put a dunce cap on my head. At the very least the OP was rude and tacky as hell. Come on, people on waitlists have to read that schmucky question. Waitlisters have to encounter the spoiled whine about how hard it is to actually commit to the one school even although they made up their mind 2 months ago. Meanwhile Jane or Joe applicant on this forum is 'dying' with each rejection and just hoping to get in off the wait list. It was tacky, mean, and indefensible insensitive. No it is not starving kids in Africa, an illustrative metaphor nonetheless, but what it clearly is, is dickish. And the consensus is with me on this. I mean not burning sacks of puppies or anything, but not cool, an "I am sorry", you all are right about covers it. Bowdoinstudent is in a unique position now to find clarity and pursue their career and recognize their relationship to their profession and the rest of the world, if that is they recognize my point, via the hyperbolic metaphor and simile I swung like a two cinder blocks tied to a rope; the ones you, for whatever reason, choose to take as some sort of near literal claim on my part. This person is an incredibly lucky and privileged person to have so many tremendous possibilities. But they come with a responsibility to be magnanimous and humble about it all. Not a passive aggressive braggart--whether intentional or no. As for the whole ad hominem whiny five year olds, you seem to completely miss the fact that the OP was perhaps the most childish post of the season. Yeah, I take umbrage with your usage of that word. Particularly as you seem to single me out as the chief whiner. Which is clearly not what I am doing, and this undercuts your ethos I think. The response to OP, while occasionally ill advised, was on the whole, appropriate and entirely expectable. I didn't discover it until late in the day, but after I read the OP, I could guess what the thread would contain. This forum is open to grad applicants both the lucky and unlucky, both the good and the bad, however those terms intertwine to produce the mess we have waded through this season and in which we will make our professional home. Why for Pete's sake, when I have so much to do, am I wasting time with this?

Its what I do. And, that advice is right on. I was coming back to edit it in. Bowdoinstudent, make your choice and don't look back. That is the way life is. Its ok to screw up, it is not ok to deny that you did. And in that spirit, I too have an offer I have to let go. I will do it tomorrow.

Wait, you heard that too! Then it must be true... I knew the DGS seemed too nice to be true: who answer's emails from wait listees at 8:00pm on a Sunday? Someone about to slaughter puppies in some ornately cruel ritualistic fashion, thats who. They're all puppy killers there. I know, I'm from Michigan, its what we do. Like folks in early modern Paris on Midsummers Day, okay maybe a touch less mob spectacle and more Catholic service puppy slaughter in lieu of wafer and wine. Laugh if you want, abluedude, but what if its true? MSU could be like the Norman Bates of English Departments. (sorry couldn't resist)

This was absolutely one of the most ill advised threads I've seen here so far. Bowdoinstudent, read this all the way through, maybe twice, it is a smack in the face, you deserve it, but it is not a mean smack in the face, I promise. I sympathize with your fear of change, really I do, I left after 36 years in the same state, 20 years in the same career. However, if I were wait listed to one of your programs or any program, I'd probably want to punch you in the mouth right now because you are acting like a spoiled jerk--I suspect that you would agree with me if you were wait listed. Now, I wouldn't punch you, that me is long gone, but I'd want to. YOU OWE FOLKS WHO ARE ON WAIT LISTS AN APOLOGY FOR THAT INITIAL POST. You're like the person with so many different meal choices they just can't stand to pick one and miss out, who is complaining that they can't decide in the presence of folks who are starving, maybe dying (dramatic? sure, but the analogy holds). You have a future, and you get to pick it, however trepidatious and scary that is--and believe me I get that it is scary, I have diarrhea for a week every time I have to make this kinda move, I understand. Folks on a wait list do not have a secure future of any kind. Their careers, their future's hang on the decisions of folks like yourself. As bad as it may be for you, and sure it is tough, it is much much worse for them. And you, like a bully have complained that you have to make such a decision in front of them. A sort of bragging, oh I've soo many choices, its sooo hard on me. Read American Pyscho, and understand that Ellis is writing an allegorical biography of the American moment. FU, I mean really, FU. You are like Paris Hilton complaining that she has to drive her BMW cause the Jag is in the shop to someone whose family just got evicted from their home. And if you are a believer in the market merit BS you obviously haven't had a conversation with some of these idiot millionaires on Wall Street. Talk about dumbies. How dare you act like you are the wounded party. Shame on you. You are going to become a scholar, an academic, a professor of English. You will follow in the footsteps of greatness, you will shape young minds, you will shape society through your scholarship, you will be one of the people who forge our culture. You are not off to a very good start here. You are young, and that is ok. But you must do better than this. You will have much harder choices and you must think more about others and less about yourself if you are ever going to be worth a damn. You may have potential, according to admissions committees, but those with the most rewards have so rarely been worthy of those rewards, do not let it be so with you. Delete this thread, post an apology, and tell the schools whose offers you "know" you are not going accept that you are not coming. Do it.

I agree with you 100%, and often rant myself, to say nothing of my disturbing tendency to typo. However, regardless of what we feel should be, the reality of the thing persists. To succeed in academia, at least on the English end, particularly at the level your ambition and its dirty little cousin your ego, urge you to, you must engage the reality, not the preferable fiction we wish to have found instead. This game is pretty messed up. It is not romantic, noble, an escape, or anything else. It is a profession, which is, in some ways, quite nasty and gross. If you get into it you will have to compromise. How much depends on your particularly goals and agendas, and your luck. I truly hope you do go on. I hope you, and all of us, remember this mess and start working to fix it when we get the chance. For decades this society has followed the echo of Micheal Douglas' character Gordon Gekko's statement, that, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." We have seen CEO pay rates jump from a modest 13ish times the average worker's to 300 times that in the past 40 years, a similar trend has occurred with college deans and presidents. As Mark Slouka argues in his op-ed in Harper's last March (I think), all American authority needs to be reevaluated and essentially drastically reduced. Police should not be able to arrest you on the street if you are not a risk to others, employers should not be able to fire you at will, CEOs and presidents and such need to have their salaries slashed by orders of magnitude, and their authority gutted. Can anyone tell me what these people do that is so important that they cannot be replaced and their duties filled by a rotating committee of faculty? How has this happened in Academia? How has the average percentage of tuition that is public funding changed from 70-80% 15 years ago, to the 20-30% it is today? Why has the cadre of tenured jobs withered to less than 25% of what it was during the American University's rise, despite the ever rising enrollment rates? Why does the less rigorous, but more economically viable faculty (cough, biz and marketing) make so much more than those that are less viable (hiccup, English and Theater)? What has that to do with university pay? Why have the arts failed to adequately describe their import to the culture at large while the sciences don't seem to have to? We cannot continue to ignore questions like these. We must start being aware of them, both the reality they expose, the fiction they deny, and the fiction that those "realities" actually are founded on and the reality that is denied by them (follow me camera guy?)--the rest of that tail spins into a Latour inspired Derridean downward spiral of messiness. We need to begin to do something about it all. However, when jumping through disciplinary/university hoops, sometimes, surrender is the only answer. How's that for a rant?

Interesting the tension this request seems to produce... :? I know someone who fears having ideas stolen. This request does require a somewhat invasive divulgence from the responder. I think that I would be willing to post all my material, every last bit of it, including my charts, and SoP, Sample, etc. Scrubbed somewhat for identity. But I do not feel comfortable doing that until after I have settled on a school. I am not sure why, that is just my gut response. That said, how much of my work should I share... I feel totally comfortable sharing strategies and lessons, teaching how, but giving away my tools, my approach seems problematic, somehow different. I will say that I had access to "successful" SoPs and they were only a limited help. Each individual is unique, each application is unique, each situation requires an individual approach. I also should point out that I am certainly not the "alpha" candidate on this board, and therefore my material might well lead people astray. Thinking...

Then my "WTF" was not a too strong, or vulgar, way to begin my question. Since the answer is so much more gross! Taking money from graduate students like that is like robing the elderly or mugging the blind. :evil:

Thanks and that is cool: knowledge is the ball in this game and despite the flaws in the system this game is supposed to be collaborative not competitive--gotta beat that capitalist market metaphor down. Although, I would suggest that you just make sure to not tell them that it came from me! Also, I did dash that off quickly, there are some faulty constructions in there, a few sentences I don't like, at least one could use a semi-colon or to be broken up, but...

Ok fine, but anybody else got anything new? (I forgot you had mentioned that post.)

Ok all this is crap. I do early modern English drama, Shakes et co. If you do not have a BA in English none of those schools will accept you. The end. I am older than you, age means nothing. Stop thinking about it at all, maybe evaluate how it is a positive. Plan to apply to at least ten schools, you can sometimes get away with seven, but you should really consider more, especially in these times. Fourteen seems a good number; if you are very ambitious do more. There is a group organizing to keep each other on task. They can help you, find them, make contacts. It is huge. Contact schools you've been rejected from, get their feedback. DO IT. Make contacts at prospective schools. Here is a link to useful stuff: http://www.washjeff.edu/users/ltroost/GradSchool.html http://www.phds.org/graduate-school/gra ... -rankings/ http://mup.asu.edu/research.html https://www.petersons.com/default.asp Some EME schools not mentioned might include, but not be limited to: University of Alabama Fordham Ole Miss, tier one unranked Boston College New York University (NYU) Loyola Chicago Pennsylvania State University (PSU) Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) University of Utah University of Kansas Saint Louis University (SLU) Northwestern University (Notice the ranking spread?) If you apply to 12 schools 1 should be top ten, worth a shot? 2 10-30, 2 30-50, 5 50-79, 2 unranked one tier I, one tier II, graduate school in a tier III is all but useless if you want to go on for a PhD. Adjust this spread to suite the undergraduate institution from which you graduated, aim up a bit, but beware of overshooting and wasting time, money, and self-esteem. My school information might be out of touch, and is intentionally somewhat flawed. You must do your own research, look at some rankings, recognize that these rankings are deeply flawed, look at some research that you've done, some scholars you liked, find out about the school they are at. There is no short cut, not to doing it right. If you cannot bother to do this, then don't bother to do it at all. Research, research, research. You should know the program you're applying to, all fourteen of them, as well as you know the one you graduated from, or at least as close to that as you can get from the website, and possibly visiting the campus, and hopefully talking to folks there. There are probably a lot of southern schools that'd work as safetyish, but I don't know them. Start reading the chronicle and books on this subject. Semenza, etc. Open your eyes as wide as you can.

1.) Contact every program you've been rejected from. Make them earn your money and give you feedback. Use that criticism next time. Do it. 2.) Your scores and GPA could all be better, but they are not keeping you out. I promise; I know folks with worse in every way, they are in good programs. Your stuff is good, but not exceptional. To get in somewhere, you must have something that is exceptional. For some its a score or two, the writing sample, the SoP, the LoRec, extracurricular activities, or the fit and/or connection to the department. 3.) Build your CV. Go to a conference or two. Make contacts. 4.) The advice of your Teaching College professors, whose grad school days are long behind them, might not be the best source of guidance; however well meaning and supportive they are. This is especially true since you seem committed to getting in at a top school. The game has changed rather dramatically over the past decade or so. 5.) Do not rely on the advice of your partner. They are not objective. The end. Besides it messes with you and your relationship. 6.) "Safe schools" DO NOT EXIST. They are myths, the closest you get is an unranked school in which you have a clear natural fit, and with whom you have had some contact. The difference between U Mary at 34 and U Mich at 12 is simply not that great, if it exists at all in your focus area, certainly in some cases, for some emphasis areas Mary might be the superior program. You must know the difference. Plus remember, all schools in major cities get 300-500 applicants. Those schools often have cut off criterion, i.e. scores, grades, alma mater, etc. Top 40 schools outside of major cities get similar numbers and have similar tacit cut-offs. 7.) Finally, know the schools you are applying to and know your field. Know them both very well. Contacts are the keys to success. Research, read essays by the faculty you want to work with, perhaps include these essays in your writing sample. Get material of successful applicants to compare your material with. 8.) Have a plan, if you don't crack the top fifty, or even tier one, or even ranked, that is ok, plan to move up. And remember, you are not entitled to a PhD. You earn it. You are not entitled to get in, you just get lucky, and maybe earn that too. Just like getting a job. The best don't get jobs, the lucky best do, and sometimes the lucky worst, while the unlucky best just don't for some fluky reason. It isn't fair. That is life. It is what kills one in four climbers on Everest, what puts a third of the world's population in extreme poverty while you and I able to dream of being professors, and while the self-centered, shallow-minded, and greedy fools on Wall Street ruin it for everybody. Go to the school that is best for you. Regardless of rank or anything else. The main thing though is Step One.

Anybody know what is happening there? They don't offer funding now to their PhDs? The faculty haven't contacted anyone, it has all come from the Gradschool. I've tried to contact the department and received no response. Whats up with them?

Short answer: Do both. Next year apply to your top schools (say four or five), the ones you would be willing to wait a year for and throw away the credits (or most of them) from your state school. Either way you'll be a stronger scholar in the end than if you don't go. Then if you do not get into your top schools, finish your masters at the state school, then apply to a broad section of PhD programs with stronger material and a plan that is very likely to succeed. Waiting begins to take on a gravity that can become harder and harder to resist. Oh, get feedback from the schools you've applied to. Do it.

hahaha

I was also accepted to MSU and have received funding information. For sure contact the DGS. I would assume that if you were sent admittance notification, then you can expect funding. That said, these are interesting times... What a crappy app season!