bigrelief

Two of my visits paid for hotels, and both of them had us double-up in rooms (which I'm pretty uncomfortable with too, but turned out better than expected). Neither program is known for being strapped for cash. I hope you end up alone, but I'd be prepared for a roommate!

WyattsTorch-- I agree with another poster that mentioning your interest in developing a "unifying theory" may have been scary to adcomms, but for a different reason. I don't think, especially coming out of a B.A., that a little academic hubris is necessarily a turn-off. My SOP was big and bold, comparing Moby-Dick to Pound's Cantos (among other more reasonable things). I wasn't proposing a project; I was proposing a way of thinking about literature that was pretty organic to me. I think the adcomms recognized and liked that, while knowing full well that my eventual dissertation project would be much more narrow and grounded. The problem, at least with the passage from your SOP that you've provided, is that you say that your goal is to develop a "unified theory" of the sonnet but you don't give an indication of what you think, even in your wildest non-theoretically-grounded dreams, what that theory might look like (except that it might have to do with rhyme-rich and rhyme-poor languages). If you said "I'm interested in tracing the history of the sonnet from its beginnings to its current forms, and I suspect that these transformations can be attributed to X" that would be enormous and unsupportable and never a possible project, but it would give the adcomms insight into your ways of thinking rather than simply your methodologies and periodization. And that instinct that you have, your Theory, could then be applied to a much smaller and more manageable project that would probably be pretty unique. I don't want to contradict your instinct that you need to narrow your time period and perhaps broaden your methodology--I think these strategies would more reliably produce a strong SOP. But I just wanted to offer support for the Big Idea SOP, since it's what I did and it worked out well for me. I suppose it comes down to this: if you have a Theory that's yours, tell them! And if you don't, don't have "come up with a unifying theory" as your goal for graduate study, have a goal like "explore connections between X & Y." I think both approaches can work.

To respond to kosmo's question about the "residency requirement"-- I think there is something in the official graduate school rules about having to live in the Princeton area the whole time, but my understanding is that this is enforced on a department to department basis, if at all. In my department, living outside of the immediate area for part of the program is not unheard of, so long as you turn up when you're needed. I certainly wouldn't worry about leaving during the summer.

I'm a current grad student at Princeton, and I really can't speak to whether the "divide" between undergrad and graduate students is greater than at other schools. It's certainly a part of the culture here that there is perceived to be ​such a divide, and you'll see snide jokey remarks about "sketchy" grad students etc in the student paper (this was the same at my undergrad institution, btw). I don't know many graduate students who have had sustained social interactions with undergraduates, although I do know one who was encouraged to join an eating club (he declined). Graduate students don't seem to join undergraduate clubs or activities--not sure if it's banned, discouraged, or there's simply no interest. The Graduate College dorm is quite physically removed from the rest of campus, and this is often taken as a metaphor. Re: "legacies," my guess is that being the child of a graduate alum doesn't really count. That said, there do seem to be attempts at encouraging a kind of graduate alumni community--they have a tent at the yearly Reunions event, at least. A final thought--I wonder if institutions like this, where there is not much of a town and the undergraduate social life seems to revolve entirely around specifically "college"-type parties and events, tend to foster a graduate/undergraduate divide because there are simply no neutral social spaces to meet one another. I feel like I rarely see undergraduates at bars in town, and they certainly never darken the door of the Dbar except to write jokey-anthropological student paper articles. I meet them in strictly academic settings, or--the few times I've been to an eating club--as an obvious interloper. Certainly I've never felt that any of this has hurt my academic life--the Graduate School itself is very responsive, and resources abound. ETA--Bleep_Bloop is right (below) that Lakeside has been a fiasco. Not really sure why it ended up being delayed as much as it did, and communication was poor. For me personally, the disaster has allowed me to stay in an apartment I love (scheduled for demolition, but in very good shape compared to some), so the impact has been minimal. The housing bureaucracy can be difficult, but if you manage to speak to someone up top they are often much more helpful.

I know somebody who got into Cornell's joint MFA/PhD program. I don't believe she was widely published, but she wrote two honors theses in her senior year--one critical, one creative. Though I didn't read them, my understanding was that they were related to one another, in that they explored similar questions about literature. I think that aside from having both an excellent MFA application and an excellent PhD application, you'll need to justify why earning them together, at the same time, will profit both your critical and creative development. She most likely got in because her double-thesis demonstrated a cohesive intellectual project. I'll echo the practical concerns voiced above, but I do think that your advantage in considering this as a freshman is that you have a lot of time to develop such a cohesive project.

Joining the chorus, but yes, definitely let her know your allergy and what you would prefer to do about it (get restaurant details ahead of time, bring your own food, etc.). Also if there are any catered events she might be able to ensure there's something there for you. I have multiple severe allergies (to milk and egg, plus a few others), and on all my visits the schools were very nice and accommodating. You'll be fine!

Last year, packages were radically different across the cohort. It was one of the reasons I didn't go, I was worried about the effect on collegiality (also a bit offended that I one of the lower offers).

I really wouldn't worry about Ivy snobbishness at the grad level. I'm currently a first year in Princeton's PhD program, and while I can't speak for the undergrads, the grad students are mostly smart, cool, and grounded. I don't think anybody in my cohort attended an Ivy for undergrad, and some attended schools that would definitely be considered lower-ranked. It's obvious that the admissions committee actually read every application. This seems to be true of other departments as well. Go where you can do your work most effectively. Ivy's have some pretty damn good faculty--don't avoid them because you're afraid they'll magically turn you into a snob.

In my experience, the magic number was 20 admits for a target class of 10. At Penn, I heard a story similar to Datatape's; they'd admitted 20 and everybody came. They were able to fund them, but had class sizes of about 6 for the next two years to balance the budget.

I think it entirely depends on the program and how much money they have. At Berkeley, you're sleeping in a grad student's bathtub and they partially reimburse you for airfare. At Princeton, everything is covered and you're sleeping two-to-a-room in a decent hotel. All visits involve lots of free food and wine! I wasn't able to find any info about this before the fact either, but it's usually spelled out when you get the invite. And if you're aggressive you may be able to squeeze more out of the schools then I did--for example, Princeton said they wouldn't guarantee to fully reimburse international visitors, but a British guy I talked to had all his airfare paid anyway.

Unfortunately, only one of the visits I was invited to was on the weekend And many of them overlapped with each other. The advantage to having them during the week is they can send you on class visits and all of the professors are around. The one weekend visit I went on actually extended into Monday, and that was when we were able to meet all of the professors. The weekend time was just being shown around campus and getting wasted with the grad students (which of course shouldn't be undersold!). Still, if you can possibly swing it, GO!!! Culture is something you just can't tell from a website, and it makes such a difference.

I sent basically the same SOP to every institution, rotating out a paragraph at the end which mentioned 3-5 professors. I agree with Stately Plump that you want to be careful about misrepresenting POIs' interests--I honestly erred on the side of vagueness in this regard, because I felt it would be better to say less than to say something wrong. I didn't think of this as a "fit" paragraph, though. I thought of it as a "proving I've done my research and do have some business applying to this school" paragraph. Because frankly, the school is always in a much better position to judge fit than you are. I think you're better off spending your time refining the rest of the statement and representing the awesome and idiosyncratic way that you think; this is what's going to get you in. I applied to Harvard because they were Harvard, not because there were a ton of professors who were especially up my alley. My "proving I've done my research" paragraph wasn't great. They took me. They know much more about their department and what kind of people they wanted than I ever could. The lesson I took from this (and this is obviously anecdotal) was that it's probably better to cast a wide net than to craft custom SOPs for each school. In terms of researching POIs, I limited it to maybe reading an abstract or two if I couldn't get a clear sense of what they did from the website (no time to read whole papers). I applied to 12 schools and got into 8.

This might be true, but from my experience with the application process, even elite institutions aren't too strict about languages. I've taken the equivalent of two years of college German and nothing else, and I was admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Penn, and a few others. Yale did reject me, and they seemed to list the most stringent requirements--but all in all, I think I worried a lot more than I needed to about my language prep.

I didn't shy away from naming assistant professors in my SOPs, but I did try to include at least one full professor in each. Besides the problem of assistant profs being potentially denied tenure during your degree, there's the chance that they've ALREADY been denied tenure (or applied for other jobs, or are generally regarded as temporary by the department) and that you haven't discerned that from the website. If you hang your SOP on a professor whom the adcomm knows is definitely leaving, you suddenly don't seem as good a fit. You could avoid this problem by making email contact with each professor you plan to name ahead of time (as suggested above) but I was actively discouraged from doing this by one of my advisors, who thought you had a greater chance of annoying your POIs than actually impressing/gaining useful information from them.

I just declined Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and UCLA. I hope this helps someone! I declined UVA about a week ago and did see an acceptance go up on the board soon thereafter... Good luck!

I'm not sure the big name will help when teaching is such a problem--my tutor at Oxford during my study abroad was American and had done his PhD at Oxford, and was having a terrible time finding a tenure track job even though he'd made every effort to teach during his degree.

That message unnerved me. I won't be able to make it to visit weekend so I can't find out in person what's going on, but I'll be interested to see what you unearth. The professor I spoke with about it thought it was strange, but didn't have any insight. If you take a look at the website, I also noticed that there seem to be only 2 second-year graduate students in the department--I'd be curious to figure out what happened there as well.

Hi guys! I'm the person who reported getting accepted off the wait list at Berkeley. Of course the DGS was a bit vague about what happened, but from what she said it may have been a case of their budget being larger than expected rather than an already-admitted student turning them down. But who knows. Regardless, I'm pretty excited! I was already planning on going to visit weekend--now I feel a bit better going as someone who's actually in. And it does appear that the wait list can be a place of hope rather than sorrow!

Thestage--I mostly agree. I read the blurbs on the department website and used what I learned to write an extra paragraph on my statement of purpose directly tailored to each school. In some cases, I decided not to apply when I couldn't find anybody. But I did not put in the extra time to read things written by the professors I'd pointed out, in part because it would take too long and in part because I lost most of my journal privileges when I graduated last June. I included POIs in my statement because it's convention. And though I'm not the Milton poster to whom thestage refers, I'm in a similar position. I've been accepted at Harvard, Princeton, and Penn. I don't know where I want to go. The work I did in the application stage (reading bios, lining up my interests with theirs) doesn't really help me at this point, and I don't really think that it helped me get in. I wrote an undergrad thesis on an unfashionable modernist poet--my thesis advisor (and a rec writer) was worried about submitting it as a writing sample. She was especially worried about submitting it to one of the schools at which I was eventually admitted because that poet is ESPECIALLY unfashionable to that department. So I think that "fit" isn't so much about finding a particular person at a particular school who does exactly what you do--it's more about presenting yourself as a smart and well-read person who can offer something, because that's a good fit anywhere. And, from reading the gradcafe, I can say with confidence that we are all smart and well-read people with a lot to offer

"Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance." --Joyce, Ulysses. More than applicable to a paper I once wrote...

I think prestige is unfortunately probably part of it. Also, something that's occured to me as acceptances/rejections have come in: many (though not all) of the schools at which I've been accepted have some connection to one of my recommenders. I don't think it's so much a question of pulling strings (though perhaps I'm naive), but rather that if a familiar name comes up on a recommendation, they might be willing to give it a bit more weight. So perhaps an additional advantage of the "prestigious" undergrad/MA is that you're more likely to come in contact with people who have contacts at good fit programs?

In response to anxious_aspirant and crystalleem, I've been accepted to some programs I'm really excited about, and I can weigh in and say that my writing sample and my SOP were very closely related. My SOP established my general areas of interest, illustrated by texts I've found particularly influential or useful. Then I talked about my honors thesis (which was related to those fields of interests and which I related to the other texts I mentioned). Then the writing sample was a section of the honors thesis in which I examined an extension of these ideas, and solved one of the problems I mentioned in the SOP. I also spent a LONG time revising that particular section, so it ended up really being one of my best pieces of writing. I don't know if this is what got me in, but I suspect it helped--basically all the elements of the app are reinforcing each other and giving a clear picture of what I'm interested in and how I write about it.

Hazelbite--YES. They say it like it's a good thing: "you'll be getting calls from ALL THESE PEOPLE," while I'm sitting here frantically composing talking points so they don't decide to rescind me when I turn out to be a babbling idiot. What are you interested in studying?

Stately Plump--I'm also waiting on my Columbia rejection. It's getting a little ridiculous. (also, can I tell you how much I love your name?? fantastic). eaw53--I'm mostly a modernist, though I'm hoping to expand that a bit in graduate school (I'm interested in organizational questions across all periods, but modernism's a bit in-your-face about it so I started there). I'm fairly undecided as of now, though Harvard was definitely near the top of the list and I'm over the moon to be in! I'm also looking at Princeton and UVA, and am on the waitlist at Berkeley. All would be good programs for me in different ways, so I'm really relying on the visiting weekends/talking with faculty to figure it out, and am amazed to find myself in a position with so much choice! An early rejection from Northwestern really freaked me out. What's your area of interest? And are you set on Harvard?

I'm on the west coast, so I got it at exactly 9am! Which meant I walked into work, opened my email, and was silently freaking out at my desk because I've told no one at work I've applied to graduate programs. Waited desperately for a coworker to stop chatting with me so I could rush outside and call my parents. This whole process has been so surreal. Congrats, eaw53 and hazel! And good luck to everyone still waiting.