NowMoreSerious

I just want to say to everyone to hang in there.  As some of you know who have been around here before, this tends to be the most stressful time, but at the end of the season everything works out.  Strange and cool things will happen; cohorts will form.  Even for the people who don't get in anywhere, by the end of the long season they normally have a much better idea of what they could do to increase their chances again.  
 
In my experience, the heartbroken people at the end aren't those who don't get in anywhere, but people who get wait listed at their dream school and don't get an offer.  That's always rough because they usually are waiting hopefully all the way until April 15. 
 
PS We are so early in the process still, too!

Boom! Congrats!!!!

omgomgomogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmogmg
 
"High on wait list" at USC. Just got the call! <dying of happiness> Hoping other USC applicants on TGC hear the same!
 
Edit: Was too high on adrenaline after hanging up to remember to add: this is my FIRST CHOICE so I'm ECSTATIC. Also, I posted undergrad GPA as 4.0 but that's my MA GPA.

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 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 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 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 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.  

Heh. As a 34 year old starting my PhD this fall, I can assure you that many of us have not been spending all of these intervening years just soaking up literature. Many of us have been working full time in careers unrelated to academia, getting married, having kids, getting laid off, divorced, etc, etc. If anything our only advantage is maybe some perspective and experiences with hardship and failure, since many early 20's PhD students have basically been academic rock stars most of their lives. But I'm not sure that makes up for the type of energy that only somebody in their early 20's can have. If you pour that energy into your work, you'll thrive.

All I can say is this, and I've said it before here. I visited 6 different schools in making my decision, and of all the fellow prospectives I met (probably at least 50), it was difficult to get a sense of what we all had in common. Many came from different types of schools, different ages, backgrounds, etc. There was also huge variation in people's GRE scores and GPA's.<br /><br />But the one thing I noticed about everybody was their unique and cutting edge interests. Everybody was looking at a really interesting subject area and doing so in a very fresh way. Of all the people I talked to, nobody bored me with their research focus. I mostly left those conversations with an enriched sense of possibilities for work in the humanities. That's how powerful I thought people's research interests were. So in presenting yourself to these schools, especially through your writing sample and SOP, you might want to tap into that, however vague or abstract or general it sounds.

When I read the topic title I busted up...it only got better when I read the post. 
 
As for your dilemma, from what I hear this is standard practice. Thankfully I scanned the posts before I finished this so yeah, what zabka and davidipse said!

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 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" 

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.  

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

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

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

What a great topic, SleepyOldMan. Last year, I didn't get into any of the programs for which I applied, and I would have really appreciated something like this. My experience is a little different than a lot of traditional students, as I've been working as a writing center administrator (I supervise and coordinate the directors) and NTT faculty at a state university (so it was a real blow last year when I didn't get in, as I'm actually working in the field right now). *By the way, if anyone with an MA is looking for a job teaching writing, we're hiring! And if anyone with writing center administration experience and an MA is looking for a job, we will be hiring this summer! Drop me a message.* Anyhow, I'm applying to Comp/Rhet programs, and my research focus is the intersection of writing centers and digital media literacy.
 
When we see people's success, what we don't usually see is all of the failure and learning that preceded the success, so I want to emphasize that I have stumbled a LOT over the course of my career in my attempts to reach my goals. My "recipe" for success is as follows:
 
1 part buying people I admire coffee and asking lots of questions
1 part making friends and collaborating with people I admire
1 part mentoring people who are a few steps behind
1 part being involved in everything I can and taking on projects/creating projects as much as I can handle
3 parts assessing the state of the field critically and specializing as early as possible in something that not many people are doing but that will only become increasingly relevant (rather than simply "doing what I love," though I do love what I do)
5 parts being willing to take risks and fail (and I did, many times)
100 parts actively making the choice to use the failures as a learning opportunity
 
Here's my stuff:
 
The Numbers
Honestly, I don't know how much numbers matter as long as they're not abysmal. My verbal and writing GRE scores are above the 90th percentile, though they're not outrageously high, and my math score is just embarrassing, but I wasn't about to learn calculus for one test.  Both my BA and MA GPA are around 3.8. My BA and MA aren't from a prestigious university at all (it's a large, open admissions state school). I counterbalanced that with pragmatism. I figured out early what I wanted to do career-wise, so I started presenting at conferences (I'd ride along with faculty and sleep on their hotel room floors. Cheap!), doing voluntary internships, seeking out mentors, starting my own projects and rallying people to help, and building experience as an undergraduate. I was never "supposed" to go to college in the first place; nobody in my family goes to college and they don't always get what I'm doing. Most of the time I feel like I'm stumbling in the dark figuring out academia, so all of this is just what has worked for me so far.
 
The Writing Sample
My writing sample this year was a risk. I finished my MA in 2009, and I've been working in the field ever since, so I have drafts from conferences that I considered revising for the sample, but I ended up choosing an ethnography that I wrote during my MA and revising it for currency. I chose that piece strategically because it quotes scholars from schools where I wanted to study and because it reflects my research interests closely (and stands to show that my research interests have been a part of my work for many years).
 
The SOP
My SOP was the document that changed most between my failed year last year and my successful year this season.  My first SOP was more of a narrative, but that chanced when I gathered all of my friends SOPs, especially those who got into programs, spread them out on a table, and looked for patterns. The successful ones seemed to follow a specific formula, so I modeled mine after the patterns in structure and tone. The first few paragraphs of each SOP were the same, but the penultimate paragraph was very tailored for each program. In cases when I knew which scholar I wanted to work with, I talked about his/her research and how it connected with my own. I focused on academics in the statement of purpose, talking about conference presentations, special projects, and even my writing in graduate school, even though it had been a while.
 
The LORS
My LORs were written mostly by people I'd worked with (because, as I said, I've been working for five years now). The first was written by a fairly big name scholar in writing center studies who had been a supervisor during my first job out of grad school (I applied for and accepted the job because I wanted to work with him). The second letter was written by my current department head, who is a tenured composition scholar. The third letter, because I thought it might be good to find a former professor, was written by a tenured professor who had supervised my teaching as a graduate student. I chose him because I had worked with his wife for years, so I knew I had stayed at least a little bit in their consciousness, and because he had always been very aware of my interest in writing centers and supportive of providing opportunities that fostered that research interest. I did make it a point to go to his Christmas party when I was back home for the holidays (because I hadn't really talked to him in years), give him materials to refer to for his letter, including essays I'd written for his class, my CV, and my website URL, and ask him specifically to focus on certain aspects of my work that the other two professional colleagues wouldn't be able to speak to.
 
The CV & Chances to See Me
After crawling out of the hole that the crushing blow of being roundly rejected by all of the PhD programs I'd applied to last year had shoved me into, I called up my mentor to talk about how I could do a better job the next time around, and the advice he gave me was to give them as many chances to see you as possible. Last year's application didn't have a cover letter, but after being rejected, I was frankly pissed, so the cover letter I wrote was aggressive and bold, and it outlined my work experience and stated, very openly, that to progress, I needed the kind of scholarly foundation that I could only get from their PhD program. I put it on departmental letterhead for a little extra clout, and followed it with my CV.
 
I did what I could to give people chances to see me. In my work, if I had a chance to travel and talk to people, I took it. I emailed scholars at other schools for advice on projects we were working on at mine. Over the summer and after application season, I emailed faculty at schools I'd been rejected from to ask what I could do better next time - and they were often people I'd met through work anyhow, so I was both receiving advice, and reminding them that they had worked with me. Sometimes trying to find a way to phrase the emails was difficult and awkward, because I wanted to maintain my dignity in the face of failure while at the same time asking for help. A phrase a friend gifted me with was "I didn't get the results I'd hoped for this year, so I was hoping you could offer some advice for next year's application."
 
Other Stuff
Like I said, this thread is awesome. We're also really lucky to have one another as resources - I am happy to share my documents with people, acknowledging that they're not necessarily perfect, but they're my best attempt and they've achieved some success. I'm also willing to give up some of my anonymity in the name of being collaborative. Here's my website (as simple as it is) with some documents that might be useful: paula-miller.com. I'm also happy to Skype or GHangout with anyone who wants to talk more.

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.