Lyrus

If I accept OSU's offer, I'll have to do some paper work. Protip: Do not write today's date in the field for date of birth. Will they reject me when they discover I am in fact not a scholarly infant prodigy? How long must I live this lie?

So, to alleviate the stress.
 
I think that George Eliot should have been one of those women who never learned to read, and instead had 12 children. Then she would have been of a neutral benefit to humanity, rather than a negative one. I mean, Gogol burned the second tome of Dead Souls - and Dead Souls was like x9000 better than anything I ever read by Eliot. And by sheer circumstance, I have been cursed with reading a lot of hers.
 
On the other hand, I just read a blog that counts good novels before and after the advent of George Eliot. Like, BGE and AGE. What is UP with that?
 
I don't get it. I wholly accept that this may indeed be the case, but I just don't get it.
 
 
Could a budding scholar perhaps explain why her writing is so valuable?

Congrats! Great news. I'm not an 18th c. British applicant, but a 16th-17th. Still waiting to hear. 

I was awarded a fellowship - calls should be coming throughout the day. Btw, sounds like they are planning on admitting another 18th C. British candidate!

I'm not a medievalist, so this suggestion might actually be harmful, but do you know about German modal particles? Watson's description of "but" reminds me of "aber" and "doch," two Modern German words frequently translated as "but." In practice, they occasionally appear, adverb-like, in the middle of a simple sentence, and sometimes the best translation just drops them entirely when they're only shading the overall tone of the sentence.
 
Ich fand aber nichts.
(But) I found nothing.

Look! I found a picture of me 7 years from now, working hard on my dissertation... it seems the stress of doctoral study has aged me prematurely though.

She seems shocked that any of us have put any thought or effort into, you know, starting a career. There's a bizarre tone of entitlement in this piece --the author comes in with an image of graduate school as a haven for dreamers putting off entering the "real world," discovers that, in fact, we kind of take this shit seriously (like, presumably, all of her former professors), and proceeds to lament the passing of a totally-not-made-up halcyon period where people would go to graduate school just to, like, you know, hang out and stuff.

Jewish, I think. But I couldn't really tell while I was there, there was this massive cathedral in the way.

And here I thought it was just a bunch of atheists being ironic. Huh.

I've got one word for guys, just one word: plastics.

Too late. Fortune theory died 15 minutes ago. We have now entered the reign of Metaphysical Dartboard Theory. Each area of the board corresponds to a different principle about the curvature or angles of our universe and their relationships to a divine prime motor. Add x principle to y literary passage and expound. Solve for Edith Wharton.

I'm actually doing intentional fortune theory now which is where you try to guess the meaning of a poem based on tarot cards designed by Donna Haraway.

I have brilliant thoughts about the Renaissance and Shakespeare. I think I should be fine getting a job, because those are some understudied topics, based on my evaluation.

For me, unfunded is a no.

I have an offer to an unfunded MA in English at a top school. I'm not going. If they could guarantee I'd get into their PhD program, I'd consider it. But I'm not going anywhere without funding, not in the humanities.

when you apply, your funding award (especially if not everyone gets one!) will actually look better on your C.V. than the name of your M.A. someone believes in you enough to give you full funding plus extra money and teaching experience for the future -- that means a lot. bonus: no crippling debt. go with the funded M.A for sure.

I don't have the time to write a full reply right now but, just...thank you. Thank all of you. You're making me tear up a little bit. Thank you for understanding and giving me a bit of hope again. I don't have anyone to talk to in real life about this kind of stuff because I'm the first person in my whole extended family to ever even go to college, and none of my friends are in college either. I love you guys.

Once you start talking about top ten schools, whether or not the school is Ivy League doesn't make much difference. Stanford and Berkeley aren't Ivy League, and they're ranked higher than most of the other Ivies. I would pick the school that most closely matches your interests; where do you think you'll be able to pursue the work you want to pursue, and where would offer the most support for your interests? Which offers the most support for your secondary interests? Are grad students publishing? Do they have funding to travel to conferences? Are they using the funding to travel?

The job market is obviously a major concern, but it's bad no matter where you go, whether it's Oxford, Harvard, or another top ten. In picking where you want to be for the next 5-7 years, I would focus on what you'll be doing during that time. The job market will be bad no matter what, so I would go to the institution where I feel I can best meet my professional goals until I have to face the market. From there, at least, you'll know that you've done all you can.

All you need is one. You're good enough.

I got an acceptance from Toronto's Medieval Studies program the other day, and — does anyone else do this? — went back to read my application. Instead of feeling a warm glow of awesomeness, I noticed that my application contained at least two sentences that just make no syntactic sense. One was missing a verb. The other's a Frankenstein's derpy monster of at least two different sentences: "Augustine’s Confessions, in which, I have argued, Augustine draws from Roman theatre culture to have made itself amenable to odd texts, then the reappearance of the Confessions, perhaps the most quizzically received and politely ignored of Augustine’s works, confirms it."

Semantic sense < clause cuddle-puddles.

In my interview they said that they start notifying as soon as March 9th, but throughout the month, and that we'd know by the end of March.

If I accept OSU's offer, I'll have to do some paper work. Protip: Do not write today's date in the field for date of birth. Will they reject me when they discover I am in fact not a scholarly infant prodigy? How long must I live this lie?

If I accept OSU's offer, I'll have to do some paper work. Protip: Do not write today's date in the field for date of birth. Will they reject me when they discover I am in fact not a scholarly infant prodigy? How long must I live this lie?

If I accept OSU's offer, I'll have to do some paper work. Protip: Do not write today's date in the field for date of birth. Will they reject me when they discover I am in fact not a scholarly infant prodigy? How long must I live this lie?

If I accept OSU's offer, I'll have to do some paper work. Protip: Do not write today's date in the field for date of birth. Will they reject me when they discover I am in fact not a scholarly infant prodigy? How long must I live this lie?

@neverstop - I appreciate that you believe anything can be accomplished with enough time, effort, passion, etc. However, based on my track record so far, I have absolutely no reason to believe that I will ever even receive an unfunded offer, so considering that possibility would be purely hypothetical. I've never received more than a single waitlist and a smattering of advice. I've heard "no" so many times that I'll admit even a "yes" with no funding would be pretty damn tempting -- but I think, in the end, I'm with Sparky in thinking that a "yes minus funding" amounts to a "no." The one positive to draw from your personal experience, however, is that your unfunded offer is strong evidence that with better timing/app materials/luck (or whatever) you are certainly capable of getting a funded offer if you continue to try. In my case, though, I have very little experiential evidence to support any argument in favor of continuing to apply.

Yes, getting my Ph.D. in English (and pursuing a career in teaching) is what I want to do more than anything else I can possibly think of. BUT working as a secretary while continuing to apply to Ph.D. programs for years and years indefinitely is pretty low on my list of dream-careers. Like I said, if there was some way of knowing that an additional, say, three-year investment in this process would give me a positive outcome, I would probably act like a starry-eyed idiot and say, "Bring it on!" I have no such guarantee. AND I've already invested approximately six years and $4000 in application costs (not to mention the money spent on my M.A. that will very likely not help me to get a job I will be happy with -- my current crappy job is evidence enough of that for me). In addition to the time and money I've lost, I've taken some serious hits to my self-esteem, my confidence, and my optimism. So you can say that "pride" is holding me back, and maybe it is, but I'd be more likely to put it down to my hard-earned sense of realism. The evidence tells me to move on, and I'm not going to close my eyes and continue to walk blindly into the same wall over and over again on the off-chance that somebody opens a door for me. So in a choice between making a career of applying to graduate school (forever) and finding some other career that, while less fabulous that my Ph.D. dream-career, can challenge me intellectually and allow me to contribute to in some way to something I care about, I choose the latter. Yes, it sucks to start over but, as far as I'm concerned, not as much as the alternative.

I appreciate that you're trying to be encouraging Please don't interpret my explanation of my decision to give up as an attempt to convince you to do the same. I think you should do what makes you happy.

@dokkeynot - If you read my earlier posts in this thread, most of your questions would be answered. I have applied to a very wide range of programs, never going by ranking but solely by fit -- I never applied to a single ivy league. The list of schools to which you applied puts my list to shame. And if my application has some fundamental flaw, the programs to which I've applied aren't telling. The feedback I've gotten (when I've gotten it) has mainly been minor, fixable stuff. And, at this point, most (all?) of it has been fixed. I know it would be comforting to those experiencing first (or second) round rejection to hear my application was doomed for some reason I'm not telling, but I can offer no such comfort. I will say that I intend to contact departments once the admissions season winds down to get feedback (even though I'm not applying again, I can see no reason not to even if simply for curiosity's sake), and if I find out anything indicative of that "fundamental flaw" I'll be sure to let you know.

Edit....
P.S. I really don't mean to throw a pity party here. In some ways this application season, though ultimately just as unsuccessful as all the rest, has been my most productive. The stress of doing this for a fourth time prompted me to take up running in September, and now I've run two half marathons and have lost the 15 pounds I gained since getting married. I'll take what I can get!! And I'm very much looking at my decision to move on in the most positive way possible -- as a fresh start.