NowMoreSerious

I'm assuming they do. During my season I got tons of hits on my academia.edu profile from all over the world. It's probably generally a good sign if you see a lot of activity.

I'm reading _The Marrow of Tradition_ by Charles Chesnutt, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. As for where I read: I read mostly on an Ikea Poang chair under my full spectrum lamp, or at a desk with good light. I don't find location to be that big a deal for reading. I find proper lighting, however, to be a very big deal.

Are you asking for a friend? I only ask this because the schools on your list are pretty much the 8 best funded Ph.D. Humanities programs in the nation. As far as I know nobody gets into any of those programs without being fully funded for a minimum of 5 years.

Frankly, it's difficult to say what type of difference it made, especially since acceptances are pretty random. In other words, people get rejected from "lower ranked" schools and accepted to "elite schools." When people ask me, though I usually recommend applying to as many schools (that you can afford) as you would attend if accepted. For example I applied to 16 schools. I got accepted to 7.5 of them. (One of them was about to take me off the waitlist but I ended up declining it because I accepted another school). This means I got declined from 8 of them. If I was only applying to 8, and I picked those 8, I would have got shut out and probably lost a lot of confidence. But I did 16 and got into my third choice, which is awesome since I wasn't sure I'd get in anywhere, coming from lower tier ranked state schools, up through the community college system.

I applied to a lot of schools and did it through a combination of student loan money, fee waivers, and a pre-doctoral program I was in that paid for about half of my schools. I'm a first generation college attendee, and the first person in my family to graduate high school in the conventional 4 years. In my 30+ years of life I have never lived in a house, only small apartments. As long as there is capitalism, money and inequality will be an issue and there's no solution.... but revolution.

I didn't mention a word about teaching experience, and I had a lot of it. I figured it was on my CV already.

Don't put too much stock in these dates, even though they have some truth. Sometimes schools just go against their normal schedule and alert late. I know certain schools like Emory always come in early, though. Duke pretty early. Berkeley usually comes in late.

I applied to Ph.Ds as a 34 year old in 2013 and I used my age as an advantage by connecting my work experience to my literary interests. I do feel a bit old sometimes but I'm young at heart (immature), so it all works out.

It's a good thing to try to improve your overall application, but always consider whether your time might be better spent working on your other documents, especially the writing sample and the SoP. I would go so far as to say that a low GRE subject score has very little bearing on the outcome of an application. I'm not trying to discourage anybody from studying from the test. It's just that I've seen many people kill themselves studying hours a day for it, only to improve their score by only a few percentage points. In one case, the person scored worse after 2 months of intense studying.

This is a genius move if you are actually on their waitlist right now.

I guess nobody remembers old Simpsons. I adapted that quote from Mr. Burns except I switched a few words around. And I was kidding.

I personally didn't say "stay in touch" unless it was to a POI that I had been in contact with. I sometimes told them that I would be declining their offer and that it was a difficult decision and that I was honored to have been accepted. Often I would describe what I particularly respected about the department. I normally didn't give a reason unless they asked, which they often do. Sometimes they will simply ask which school you've decided on, and other times they will ask you about your financial offer. I also do not think it's bad form to say you chose based on the fellowship offered to you by another school. I know for a fact that sometimes schools use these reasons as evidence that they need to allocate more money to graduate students.

Love, Friendship, and Family. These are the three demons you must slay to succeed in graduate school.

I can't seem to find it, but a few years ago somebody got rejected from an ivy and under the comments said (paraphrasing), "And we can assure you, that not only are the people we did accept more intelligent, but also better looking"

I'm surprised nobody has asked this yet, but what's your area of interest? I don't think it's possible to give you the best advice without knowing this bit of information.

http://bigthink.com/videos/literary-criticism-the-art-of-slowing-down

Fiz, I just want to say that I was in a very similar situation as you. I'm the first and only person in my family to graduate high school conventionally. I'm the first and only person in my family to attend college. My high school GPA was actually lower than yours and I am also a product of the community college system. Everything you are feeling, especially the cold feet, is normal for anybody. The reason I asked you where you got in was because I was trying to figure out how far away from home and what type of city you were moving to. That does make a difference. And let me be brutally honest. You will sometimes feel like you got in because of your ethnicity. People will think you got in because of your ethnicity. But you don't have to prove shit to anybody except yourself. The people who will question you do not have the intelligence to be self-reflexive and question the advantages that brought them to graduate school. This is something I have had to think about through most of my school and academic career, so feel free to private message me if you want to talk any of this stuff out in more detail and we can take it from there.

Where have you been accepted to?

You all read and write about seduction. We're too busy practicing it.

Even though I have no evidence, I'm also going to say our love lives are better. I've now written 3 term papers and a thesis chapter on Henry James. My joke is I do the short 19th century. Melville to Henry James. But seriously, folks.

I feel Americanists party harder and drink more. And I feel this is a good thing. I do long 19th century and early 20th century up to about 1945ish.

Congrats! Great school and program. I went to their visiting week last year so feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

If you are actually on NYU's waitlist, this is an ingenious post.

I only applied to the University of Minnesota one, but I researched the rest of them pretty well.

Off the top of my head: Stanford MTL Berkeley Rhetoric University of Minnesota: Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society UC Santa Cruz: History of Consciousness Brown University: Modern Culture and Media Ohio State: Comparative Studies University of Chicago: Social Thought Duke: Literature