Doctor Cleveland

I would urge you to submit a single piece of writing rather than combining two shorter things. It's true that admissions committees and the individuals on them value different things. But one of the underlying things all reasonable committees are looking for is the applicant's potential to write full-length pieces of academic prose in the near future. Two of the unspoken but absolutely crucial questions are 1) How close are you to being able to write a publishable journal article? and 2) How close are you to being able to write a successful dissertation. (The winning answer to both questions is "about 5 years away.") You can't predict how people will turn out, but you can identify if they're currently on track. Students who can write strong BA- or MA-level term papers, at full length, are on track to develop into successful academic writers within a reasonable time. Maybe they won't, but right now they're where they should be. Someone whose best work is only ten pages long may NOT be on track: s/he may not yet have learned to develop a full-length argument, and may have to spend the first year or two in the program learning those skills. Adcomms want to see that you can already write a decent seminar paper.

I've actually served on graduate admissions (although I won't this fall or next). The important thing to remember is that this statement is not (repeat, not) a college admissions essay. It's a totally different genre, a totally different beast. You do not help yourself by telling the committee about your "journey." That is an undergrad-admissions thing. The committee doesnt want to know why you love literature. The SOP is basically there to demonstrate that you will be able to come up with a workable dissertation topic some day. That's what it's for. It's not a personal statement. It's a Statement of Purpose. It's not about where you come from. It's about where you're going.

Yes, MLA insists on the name tags, to the point that there are often people at the doors of panels checking for them. I've had an experience where a job candidate who didn't register needed me to leave the interview room so I could come get him past a security person. MLA can be overwhelming. Doing any successful networking there requires specific planning and the willingness to accept limited goals. You can see people whose work you admire give papers, but you'll have to plan ahead to find their panels. And you'll often be able to introduce yourself briefly to speakers, but they might not have time for much more because MLA is crazy for them, too. Smaller conferences can be better while you're building an early grad-school network, not least because you can count on almost everyone at such a conference being in your subfield (and therefore someone you're likely to see at another conference relatively soon).

Think of it this way: grades and GREs are mostly for screening applications and weeding them out. Writing samples and statements of purpose are for making final decisions. Your writing sample will get you into a school. Your GRE scores make sure that the writing sample gets read. You need a good enough combination of GPA and GREs to get your application to the admissions committee. But after that it doesn't matter much. This is mostly fair and logical. GREs are not a great predictor of you successful you will be in academia. A sample of your academic writing, though, is a very good indicator of what kind of academic writer you are.

Yes, this is exactly right. And these programs are not useful stepping-stones for applying to literature programs. I agree with statelyplump that going unfunded is a bad thing. And her point that Georgetown is a good choice because it doesn't have a PhD is right on the money. At schools with a PhD and a terminal MA degree, the usual problem is that the PhD students soak up all of the faculty's attention, leaving none for the MAs. (Bad for your learning experience, and not so good for getting rec letters.) A strong English department that only has MA students invests faculty attention in those MA students.

Getting an unfunded MA, itself, will not disqualify you from anything. No one reading your Ph.D. app knows if you were funded or not (unless you have a special fellowship to brag about), and in any case paying for your own MA is very common. What is potentially stigmatizing are programs like the MAPH, or Columbia's Master in Liberal Studies Program, which are designed to get across (through their names) that they are not "really" in the English Department. Adcomms at elite schools will likely see a program like that as a sign that you were not admitted into that university's English Department, and they are all too likely to view this as a weakness on your record. Being in a "generalist" MA program at a prestigious school is something that an exceptional applicant can overcome. But that is how you should view it: as something to overcome.

The funding and the teaching experience. Better if you're going on for a PhD, and much much better if you decide to teach community college with an MA. (Hiring a Chicago MA in Humanities with no teaching experience is not as attractive as hiring someone with a state-school MA who's been teaching for the last two years.)

I think the place that didn't wait-list you might end up giving you more love. There's fit on paper, and then there's how much a program decides to invest in you as a student. Lots of people get in off wait-lists and have brilliant careers. But if a higher-ranked program took you outright and a lower-ranked program is still making up its mind, I'd say to go where the love is.

Actually, you can present twice (but not three times) at the same MLA. And having too many abstracts accepted is not the usual problem. Conferences aren't something you need to have on your CV to get into PhD. They are something you need on your CV to get a teaching job. So you should plan to start going a few years before you're going on the job market. Conferences are for making connections (which happens slowly and gradually, conference by conference) and for developing a paper who've written for a class into something more publicly presentable, which is an important middle stage in the process of turning it into a publishable paper.

I'm long past grad school now, so take this buttinsky faculty advice for what it's worth: 1) The main choice that you're making is a choice between studying with Gordon Teskey and studying with Nigel Smith. Those are the people who would become your dissertation advisers and mentors, the people who would have the most influence on your intellectual growth, and the people who would help you find a job as a Miltonist. In fact, writing a Milton dissertation with anyone except your school's senior Miltonist would damage you badly on the job market. Talk to them. See how you get along with them intellectually. Gauge what it would be like to start a teacher-student relationship with them. Read some of their work if you haven't already. This is the most important thing. 2) Your relationship to Teskey or Smith will be your most important professional relationship, but not your only one. If both potential advisors seem equally appealing to you, ask yourself how interesting the other early-modern faculty (the junior scholars and the drama people) are. You will take classes from those people, and some of them will be on your diss committee someday. A great second chair does NOT make up for a problematic first chair, but a good first chair with a good second chair trumps an equivalent first chair without one. It's worth pointing out that Princeton is hiring a new young associate professor, so factor whoever they hire into this secondary question. 3) What are the Miltonist grad students at each place like? Your peers are also going to be an important part of your intellectual and professional life. Think about whether you're interested in those people as classmates and colleagues. That's my $.02. Back to peer advice.