glasses

Thanks again, folks -- I'm thankful to have been done with this stuff for twelve days. (On second thought: not so grateful. The agony of waiting.) Ended up using a cover sheet that wasn't much of a letter, and went like this: "Enclosed please find the following supporting materials for my application to the English Literature PhD program at Your Phenomenal University: * Thingamabob * Thingamajig * Stuff and things Thanks very much! Sincerely, Glasses Glasses' Contact Information" Would've just included the materials, but I'm an organization freak.

My pets aren't high maintenance now, but you never know what's in store, so, I have 3 credit cards that I keep entirely free for emergencies and an (admittedly meager) savings account for non-emergent medical needs. (I know -- from personal experience, actually! -- that credit cards are brutal revolving doors, but you gotta do what you gotta do; in case of emergency, it's really useful to have a substantial uh-oh stash hiding out that you can pay back over a period of time, even if it is with fiendish interest rates.) I'd suggest that you start saving A.S.A.P. while you still have the three gigs and look into finding your own emergency stash if possible.

Oh Embark, how you drive me nuts. Your definition of a "status update" is "this application has been submitted" versus "this application has NOT been submitted": I could've kept track of that much myself. Now I have to call those admissions offices because I sent important stuff through the post (like, say, writing samples -- if those don't get to the right places my entire application is tanked right off the bat). They are not going to be happy to hear from yet another applicant, and I can't blame them in the least. Embark, you have turned me into one of them: the kind of person who mercilessly bogarts other peoples' time to assuage her own panic.

I don't think the silence here necessarily means that there are barely any openly gay folks here, and frankly, I would hazard a guess (of course based on my own highly anecdotal and individual experience) that openly gay people are not "quite a rarity among the educated." I am a bisexual woman and openly so, but as my sexuality has no bearing on my work, I have not had any experiences that are relevant to the question you asked, which was: In fact, I don't think my sexuality came up once in any of my applications. Similarly, my only mentions of my minority race was checking boxes on the "ethnicity" sections of the generic demographic-related pages. This is not to say that I think the world is gay-friendly (dear God, it isn't) or minority-friendly in general (ditto), and I most certainly have faced trepidation and worry about both things in other areas of my life. The application process, however, was not one of them.

To me, it reads as though the lesson is: "Try (if you must), but know that you may not succeed; then try, try, again. And maybe fail, fail again. Repeat as needed, or until you pass out." Which, honestly, is a lesson that applies to absolutely everything. I know that the academic job market is particularly grim; I also know that as a mere grad-school hopeful, I know nothing. But I do take comfort in the fact that I have never heard anyone say, about any job: "Oh, you want to be an ABC?! Great! If you do all of these things you will totally get an excellent, permanent gig immediately and your life will never be awful." These doom-and-gloom tales only serve to remind me that in applying to grad. school, I am applying for a job that will hopefully but not necessarily lead to another job -- a worthwhile reminder, but not the kind of thing that's going to stop me from trying for the job that could lead to the job or trying for the job that results after getting the job (etc.). A pal of mine adjuncts at three universities and has for a while. Another pal is a newly-minted tenure-track professor. Similarly, I have a friend with great qualifications who can only get temp. gigs in her (non-academic) industry, and another friend who has risen up in the ranks of the same industry so fast that I get vertigo thinking about it. Who knows?

That's a doozy. On a more lighthearted (and hallucinogenic) note: I, on the other hand, have been watching too much Lost. About two weeks ago I got the flu (yet again -- the THIRD time this winter; evidently my caffeine-centric diet is not the world's most nutritious). I had a really high fever, and I don't remember much about the first two days. I do remember one hallucination-dream, though. The English department of my top-choice school was sitting around a giant conference-room-style table. Their heads kept turning into brightly-colored animal heads -- Super Impressive Scholar's head became a pink elephant head, Really Amazing Scholar's head became a blue horse head, etc. -- and they kept thumbing through manila envelopes with application materials in them. The folders had giant labels on them with the names of each applicant. There was one more spot, and they had it narrowed down to me and Ben Linus. I wish I remembered more, although I really don't need to . . . I mean, it's Ben Linus. If he wanted the spot, he'd have gotten the spot. March could not come quickly enough.

Jacib, is there any way that you could let me know what "Please, please let me in" is in Turkish? I find myself muttering this all the time, and it would be cool to know how to say it in another language! Well, all this fear about getting scooped has only enhanced my own fear of getting scooped, but I will say this: I study English, and my reason for studying it is the exact opposite of rainy_day's (which is part of why I like the field as a whole). I'm al all-text-only-text-all-the-time kind of gal, and I study poems.

Thanks everyone! I'm going to do the checklist-style cover letter. @fuzzylogician: thanks for the heads up about giving schools time to sort things out before contacting them -- I actually don't plan on contacting them at all (I don't want to add to their workload by making them check).

Hi folks -- I have a few supplementary materials packets left to send, and while all of these schools have forms for paper recommendations, none of them seem to have a "cover sheet" for the entire supplementary materials packet. I'm not entirely sure what to do in this situation: do I write my own cover sheet listing the contents of the envelope? It seems odd to just plop everything into an envelope and cross my fingers, especially since these supplementary packets are going to have some pretty vital stuff in them. By contrast, the two schools to which I've already sent supplementary packets DID have required cover sheets for all supplementary packets. I'd've called them directly, but I made the mistake of waiting till now (fine-tuning, etc.), and the websites say that the grad. admissions offices are closed for the holidays. I, of course, had almost forgotten that the holidays even exist. If it helps, the schools in question are: Harvard, Brown, BU, and Brandeis. Am I missing some giant link somewhere to a cover sheet on all four of these apps? Thanks a million.

Seconding this. Understandably, it takes some time for schools to sort through the gazillion pieces of data that we send and log it all. They might have logged the receipt of general scores first and then moved on the subject scores: who knows. All I know is that I've had similar episodes of fear lately, and everything got cleared up sooner or later; as long as you get that copy from ETS saying that they sent exactly what you ordered, I think you're fine.

I have a Mac, so I couldn't use PowerPrep on my machine either (FYI, this was 2 years ago; I don't know if they've changed it since then to make it Mac-compatible); I borrowed a friend's computer, and, like @ScreamingHairyArmadillo, I'd highly suggest that you try to do so if you can't get the software to run on yours. The paper tests and paper sample questions just aren't the same: they're great for practicing GRE questions, but not useful for practicing GRE-taking. Good luck.

This is all kinds of unethical.

As are mine, for the most part -- actually, we have some overlap! Perhaps this rule differs by discipline? Anyway, back to @leo89 . . . Yes, that's what I meant. But as for what you should do, that's entirely up to you, and it really all comes down to (1) your discipline's approach to the GREs (as illustrated by my exchange with @swisnieski), (2) when you think you could do your best on the test, and (3) how you think the changes to the test can affect you. (See the ETS website for more information about the changes; I think the New York Times also did an article about them.) I'd recommend researching the changes to the test and talking to a few advisers.

I don't think this would be a good call . . .

I wouldn't. While I can't imagine that schools will have a problem with a score that's a few years old, I highly doubt that they would keep your scores in a file for you for so long.

I'm not sure if this is true? I'm a first-time applicant, so obviously I don't know anything, but I took the GRE in 2007 and I'm applying now. I've been told that's just fine. The downside was that at the time, I did not know where I was applying, so I couldn't take advantage of the free score reports. But I did get four free score reports with the subject GRE I had to take this November, and since you're allowed to send general score reports along with the subject score reports I ended up getting my 4 freebies anyway. If you're not taking a subject test and won't have that option, it seems like the only downside to taking the test so early would be that you'll have to pay $80 that you wouldn't otherwise have had to.

As I see it, the best way to "come across as honest" is to "be honest."

True that.

Yeah, for my first several drafts I had the uncontrollable urge to "buck myself up." I didn't pretend I knew anything that I did not, but I did adopt an incredibly pretentious tone. (Are there any TV fans out there who remember when, in "Friends," Joey tried to sound smart by using a thesaurus on every single word of his recommendation letter for Monica and Chandler's adoption? He tried to say that they had big, warm hearts, and ended up writing something like "they are warm-blooded mammals with full-size aortic pumps." That was me. I tried to pretend I knew ALL THE WORDS! In the WORLD!) I also tried to cram every single thing I have ever done into the statement: the apparently common regurgitate-the-CV mistake. It was an insecurity thing, I think. I'm terrified of coming off as woefully inadequate, and I suppose my first reaction to that was to try to sound like a bona-fide arrogant jerk. My next several drafts went the opposite way: as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the obnoxiousness of the first several drafts, I bypassed modesty altogether in favor of a kind of "uh, yeah, I read some stuff, and I guess I'm good at this and ready for this, you know, if you think I am, maybe?" I think I finally got the right balance about a week ago! Which is great, considering it's Dec. 18th and two of my applications were due this week. It took 24 drafts!

The existence of this fella drives me insane. I went to a fancy college for undergrad: I got financial aid because I was an emancipated minor, and it felt like a gigantic blessing -- giant doors opening on possibilities that I never even considered real. That sounds corny as hell, but it's true. I was also homeless for part of that, and during that time I lived in the crappy car that I bought when I moved out of my folks' place at fifteen. I snuck into dorms for showers. So on, so forth. And if someone had offered to get me an apartment, I would have taken it in a heartbeat and with gratitude. No delusions of grandeur: just a gal who got into a college that she didn't think she'd ever get into, found out she loved it, and was willing to do whatever the hell it took to keep going there. I also made some great friends there -- folks who were utterly understanding when I "came clean" about my living situation (something that I admittedly did very, very selectively, to about four classmates and a couple professors) and completely jazzed for me when I managed start making enough money to get myself an apartment! Just an anecdote to say that not all folks who go to fancy colleges are (1) fancy or (2) asshats, and that people who are (1) fancy are not always (2) asshats. "Real" people exist everywhere -- and, as far as I can tell, so do pretentious jerks!

Could you confirm this somehow? Been scouring the web to figure out whether or not this is true -- I think I remember reading that schools do NOT get your essay when I was prepping for the test, but that was two years ago, and I may have no idea what I'm talking about. Just curious.

Thanks, guys. Stuck them on the resume before sending out the first supplementary packet! (Eek!) Mathētēs, I just put "memberships" as a heading and then listed the full names with the acronyms in parentheses. ("Modern Language Association (MLA)," etc.)

I've actually been told to put everything on basic white. Just throwing that out there . . .

Oh my god: Puppetry!

Hey guys -- I've noticed that academic CVs often list their memberships or affiliations. Are we expected to do this? I'm an MLA and ALSC member, but it seems kind of--well, there's no other word for it--douchey for a gal with just a BA to list memberships. That being said, I don't want my fear of coming off as a douche to prevent me from doing something I should be doing, you know?