dazedandbemused

Right after I wrote that, I realized that you were totally around the boards then. My bad! Congrats on your PhD success, btw.

I'm glad you at least had a good time! I'm sorry our conversation got cut short, but it was really cool to meet you. Good luck with your choices, and if you have any leftover questions, feel free to PM me.

Ha, Fall 2013 is when the doc was originally made. I'm glad y'all are still using it though! We made it cause we were annoyed by the lack of transparency about funding.

I agree with everyone here. I also went to a small school that literally no one had ever heard of (until recently), and I think the biggest obstacle for anyone applying from a small school is being able to recognize your competition and what graduate applications should really look like. I don't know the make up of your school, but my department had nine professors, and only one was actively involved in publishing and attending major conferences. As a result, while they're more than well versed in the traditional canon and can provide good overviews of the different theoretical schools, they just aren't aware of the contours of the discipline as it stands right now, or the way that graduate applications work. I applied to grad school twice, and the difference between my applications was night and day because the first time I tried, I was holding incomplete information about what the actual function of the SOP and writing sample are, which is how I ended up with a handful of unfunded MA offers and not much else. My advice? Take as many different classes as you can and don't try to specialize until you've actually gotten to the point where you're sitting down the summer before your senior year to begin preparing to apply. This might be controversial, but I think it's important to have as wide of a base as you can in undergrad because you have forever to specialize. I know multiple people who's specialties changed right before they started working on their dissertations. You want to leave yourself open to finding something fascinating that you never would have expected. When you do apply, find people who are already in grad school or professors who have experience on adcomms to read your work. Don't stress the GRE because, while important, it's not that important and I don't think repeatedly throwing money at ETS is productive. Also, spend some time seriously thinking about why you want to go to grad school. On the nights when your prof assigns 300 pages and you also have to turn in a draft of your Seminar paper, you're going to need those reasons to keep you going.

Hey, I'll be helping out with recruiting stuff on Friday, so y'all should come say hi! I'm the black girl with dreads.

I've certainly never been on the job market, but being a couple of years in and fully dedicated to it, I do think that everyone here should have a plan for how much they're willing to give up in order to make their dreams a reality. There have been some major changes to the way my department operates just in the last six months (although, so far, they've all been for our benefit), and it has forced us all to really come face to face with the realities of the market. Incoming cohorts are shrinking to account for the future of the job market. We've now got an extra year of funding added to the end because they're realizing that nobody gets jobs ABD anymore. I've already made the decision that I'd only dedicate two years to the job market after I've finished, because I would never be willing to let adjuncting become my career. Others will feel differently, but as long as you can clearly articulate how much you're willing to give and what kind of jobs you'd be willing to take, you at least can begin forming your plan B for when the shit finally hits the fan.

Oh, that I actually don't know for certain. I know they had planned to shrink the cohort size this year because of budget issues, but I don't know what they decided on. The last I heard, it was going to be about 18 people. And yes, at least for the last three cohorts there's been one DLL person.

Yes, the waitlist is according to field because their philosophy is that each incoming cohort is meant to represent a cohesive representation of the departments strengths. Specifically, I was told that they want the people in the cohort to compliment each other in a way that stimulates a feeling of intellectual community. There's usually more than one person in a few fields, like Medieval and Victorian, but that's to be expected with such large cohorts. And I'm not really sure what you're asking in your last question, could you clarify?

I think you're confusing BC and BU, actually. Doesn't BC only have 4-5 people in their PhD cohorts? At any rate, I almost went to BC for an MA after my first app cycle (I even accepted the offer) but I have nothing particularly substantive to add to help you out

Yes, this was my immediate impression of what you've written as well. My first draft of my SOP was also ripped to shreds by a professor because it was both too specific and too broad. You've proclaimed a plan of attack that doesn't really include room for growth in a graduate program, but it also sounds like such a large project that it's actually kind of a detriment to your self-presentation as an academic in that it's almost grandiose in its impenetrability. I guess I'll answer your original question as well and talk about my specialization, which took me a long time to formulate and which is constantly in flux, even two years in. I knew that I wanted to be as much of a generalist as possible, and I knew I wanted to work with gender and race. The first time I applied to grad school, I positioned myself as a Victorianist interested in Queer theory, but a year later I had decided on the 18th century because I thought the women novelists in that period offered better diversity, even though they were more obscure. Then I realized that in order to talk about race, I should be focused on the transatlantic world, which suited me perfectly because I didn't feel comfortable thinking in nationalist terms. Honestly, that's as far as I had gotten in terms of formulating a point of view when I applied, but I made certain to point out some interesting future avenues to pursue to show that I was thinking inside the larger field as it existed at the time, even if I hadn't yet articulated the countours of my field (which is 18th century transatlantic women writers with a focus on the early novel). Nobody expects you to know exactly what your dissertation will say, but they do expect you to show that you know what kind of research questions English grad students should be asking and how you see their program helping you to answer those questions. At the beginning of the fall semester, I expressed my anxiety about being a year in and not really having a clear path yet, and all of my advisor/mentor figures told me to just keep reading and keep taking classes and something would come up. I totally didn't believe them, but then I had a breakthrough last week that I never could have had without the last three semesters of work behind me. The whole point of that anecdote is just to say that while it's important to present a well-rounded and self-assured persona when discussing your research, I think it's also important to show that you're still open to being shaped.

Oh man, getting an email reply from Wayne is close to impossible. Did you cc Amy? She's your best bet for a reply.

The averages in that thread is for a 2/2 though, so that still averages out to $750 per person, and considering that so many of the apartments built in the last couple years are super high end, that average makes sense. There's still plenty of stuff below it though. I've only been here for two years, but I got my apartment during prelease time, which is notoriously more expensive, so I'm not hating on your longer experience, I just think your original post is exaggerated.

That's also pretty inaccurate. I live alone in Hyde Park (which is the neighborhood directly north of the university) and my rent is $600. That average might be correct, but there are still plenty of places where you can live alone for under $1000, and if you have roommates, you probably won't have to pass $700.

Then I think you'd definitely like it here. Play your cards right, and you might get a visit weekend trip to Austin's premier shitty dance club. We like to wine and dine. I'm not super familiar with the 19th C Americanists (I'm 18th C Transatlantic), but Gretchen Murphy is a resident badass and all around excellent person. And now that Austin rent prices are supposed to be leveling off, you might not have to worry about the cost of living undergoing too much inflation to make being in the program sustainable.

So, I don't know if you've looked at any of the UT threads from years past, but that easy cameradie that people developed on here became really awesome friendships IRL, and the excessive devotion to UT is real. I was super skeptical when I applied and all the students told me they didn't mind the tiny stipends because they love it here that much, but two years in that's basically all I have to say. Don't get me wrong, I complain about being poor ALL the time, but I know I've got a bunch of friends that are suffering with me.* It was important to me that I was in a program where I could make real friends and not just work acquaintances, so if that's what you're looking for you can definitely find it here. And of course, they professors are excellent. What's your field? (*I also really hope none of them ever read this because I will totally get made fun of.)

If it helps, people here get in off the wait list all the time. They only send out exactly as many acceptances as there are spots, and the acceptance rate on first offers has been around 50% in the last few years. The last three cohorts have been from a third to half made up of wait listers.

Congrats on UT! If you, or anyone else, has questions about it here, feel free to PM me.

I think you're right on the money with this one. Some of my favorite people were originally random usernames on this forum. And congrats to the acceptees! I still remember everything about the moment I got into my program so I can imagine all the feels right now.

This is also an excellent article that basically summed up my feelings about the last few months. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/703-after-ferguson-some-black-academics-wonder-does-pursuing-a-ph-d-matter

No, I have absolutely no data on applicant numbers. I'm saying that the number of *acceptances* have been going down for awhile and perhaps applicants are finally reacting to the trends.

When I mentioned it to the first years, they almost all said that they didn't want to be part of "that toxic website". And to be fair, there have been some crazy moments, and I know people lose their minds slowly about the results board. A lot of people in my cohort and the year above me were active on here, and we still talk about some of the trolling. But, as I said, I think the interesting conversations and clandestine information sharing more than made up for it.

I actually asked my DGS a few months ago to give me a rundown of how the selection process works because I was so curious and the process is so unbelievably opaque. If I had to throw an opinion in the ring, I think the perceived lack of applicants this year might be us finally seeing the result of schools that are shrinking their acceptance numbers and advising their students not to go to grad school. Top 50 schools have been steadily lowering their acceptances for a few years now. My program is shrinking in the fall and they are going to get even smaller over the next couple of years--and they've always had HUGE cohorts. Then again, I know gradcafe has earned a reputation in the last couple of years, so maybe everyone is just steering clear (although I've had some great times on this forum).

I just want to be clear that while I have had a lot of emotional support, this program is not anywhere near being a graduate school utopia. While I love it here and I love my people here, there is some BULLSHIT--but it's also probably no worse than any other department. Not only that, but Austin is kind of a shitty city to be a minority in already, so it's been one of those semesters that is just fraught with social tension. So, when I say ahistorical I'm talking about the guy1 who wants to talk about war without talking about imperialism, the girl who wants to write about the postbellum South without talking about race, and the people who think that the aesthetic is more important than the political and believe that there is actually a such thing as inherent literary value (which is a point that I disagree with, but can at least understand). Even though these conversations are classroom-specific and probably seem unrelated to police brutality, they are also places where the "good liberal" facade that most academics wear tends to slip and people's biases become visible. To me, those moments are dangerous. The virulent racists are at least the enemy you know, but what happens when these people become professors and administrators? They theoretically understand that we are not in a post-racial society, yet simultaneously feel perfectly comfortable repeatedly using the n-word in class because their desire for an unmediated interaction with the text is more important than my and other black people's trauma?2 I find it deeply disturbing and I'm not sure what to do about it. 1These are actual people in my program, by the way 2 Yup, that happened too.

Proflorax, I had a very similar experience in the classroom. I'm only a TA, which makes me feel like I don't really have a political arena the way that I might if I was an instructor of record. I'm also a black woman, so I often find myself questioning how my own vehemence and activism will translate to my largely white audience. I also completely agree that modern scholars should absolutely be activists. To be honest, I've found myself having this discussion with my cohort members frequently because the turn to a sort of new aesthetics is really sitting with me the wrong way due to how many people seem willing to use it as an excuse for an ahistorical approach. We have been having meetings and marches and rallies here in Austin, and it's been extremely heartening for me to see fellow English grad students involved and English faculty acting in leadership roles in the protests. It's been a really awful semester due to the constant barrage of stories featuring police brutality, but my professors have been extremely understanding, and I have been able to cry with teachers and fellow students in the last week, which is very cathartic. I think my current frustration is primarily with the way liberalism manifests in academia--everyone is horrified by the failure of progressive values, but few people actually intend to do more than write about it on Facebook and I don't know if there's really anything to be done about it.

I'll follow your stupid question with another stupid question--what exactly is an area exam? I'm making an educated guess in my head, but what is ultimate outcome of this exam supposed to be? In my program we have the field exam which is geared toward helping you figure out your intervention in your own field, but I'm guessing this is a different thing.