toasterazzi

That's exactly how I feel about it .

Haha I like that. I need to make a collage of all the pretty campuses My Facebook is on lock as well, and most of my social networks don't have my name attached. LinkedIn and Academia.edu are the first sites that come up for me. Then there's all those random sites that collect all your info from the internet for some inexplicable reason. I've already gone to a couple of them and had them delete everything they had about me. I suspect I'll have to visit a few more. The most interesting things that come up about me are from my undergrad years. I appeared in the school newspaper at least a handful of times because I was in Student Government, I ran for Homecoming one year and I was on the executive board of my campus' LGBT group. I had an interview once years ago where the interviewer told me I should obscure my pro-LGBTness for future endeavors, but I'm quite proud of the work I did with that group and those mentions are important to me.

Yeah I think that's fairly normal. I'm mostly optimistic as long as I don't think too hard about the numbers...I hate numbers lol.

I currently work in a bookstore during the summer and school breaks and I find that to be a nice change of pace from teaching/grading. Also, the employee discount is pretty handy .

It's cool. I've had friends who've worked for the org and done good work, and I'm sure most of the individuals involved have the best intentions. Hell, I had great intentions when I tried to get in. But my opinion on those in charge has gone south based on information I've read about them since then.

I haven't read through the link above, so I'm not sure if it's mentioned in that thread, but this is one of the books we use in my grad theory class: http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Theory-Today-User-Friendly-Guide/dp/0415974100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365265135&sr=8-1&keywords=lois+tyson. It's really good at providing an overview of the theories along with showing how they'd be applied to actual texts, which can be useful (at least for me) before delving into some of the essays.

Oh there's definitely worse jobs hehe. Honestly, I probably would've gone for another year, but there were some serious issues with the administration that I could not stand any longer.

Oh that was about two years ago, so I'm cool with it now. And I've learned a lot more about their process and some of the stuff they do that makes me fairly happy I didn't make the cut. After a year of doing tech support, I eventually landed a teaching job at a middle school. But I quickly found out that middle school was probably not the place for me lol.

Haha back when I deluded myself into thinking Teach for America would be a great life choice, I applied two years in a row. They rejected me twice. I have a degree in Education...*sigh*... Once I've officially narrowed down my list and read through some work from profs who interest me, I think I might contact a few. I'm not strongly opposed to the idea.

Not that I think anyone here is hyperfocused on me, but I just wanted to point out that I changed my username. I know it always throws me off when people I've been talking to online for a long time change their usernames lol. Sincerely, The Artist( ) Formerly Known as reluctantmidwesterner

Oh yeah, I'll definitely be checking back in on schools at least a few times before application time for date changes, updated info, new publications, etc.

Yeah so far I have a bookmark folder, a word document and an excel spreadsheet. Trying to stay on top of things for the win!

I feel like it's a test to see how dedicated we are lol.

I'm a teacher by trade (Bachelor's degree in English Education), so I might be biased, but I would definitely take the opportunity to teach if offered. I haven't found it to be especially overwhelming, but I was coming off having 80 middle schoolers when I started last fall, so there's that lol. If you want to teach as your ultimate goal, I would say this is a good time to get some experience. Personally, the idea of grading for someone else's class has never really appealed to me. Granted, I certainly wouldn't shun the opportunity if it was the only one offered. But if given the opportunity, I'd much rather be working with the students myself.

Hahaha that totally makes sense to me. I've gone through several schools at this point, and I'm currently working with a list of twenty schools or so after having axed several others for some reason or another. My pet peeve is when the schools don't have course information available. That bugs me so much lol.

Yep. Looks about right. I find myself being (perhaps overly) critical of schools based on their websites. It just doesn't make sense to me how some places, my current school included, make it so ridiculously difficult to find information.

I mean, if it's fully funded and it wouldn't disrupt your life too terribly, it sounds like a good idea to me.

Yep. I will most likely save some cash this summer and then promptly be unbearably broke once I apply to schools and pay for the GRE and pay for the GRE scores to be sent and pay for transcripts to be sent from two schools (sometimes to two departments) and....*sigh*... Agreed. I kind of enjoy it even though it makes me slightly unhinged lol. *steals idea* Haha. I have a hate/tolerate relationship with the midwest after living here for my entire life. I'm fairly open to most of the country (with only a couple absolutely no way, no hows), and there are certain places I'd definitely love to live that have ridiculous costs of living, especially when compared with the midwest. I've never paid more than $549 per month for rent, so that's gonna suck. But I'll take it in stride I suppose. This is definitely a good point. There's tends to be a lot that I like about cities that are deemed to be more progressive, but they definitely have problems. I grew up near and love Chicago, for example, but the segregation and inequity in that city agitates me quite a bit.

Haha I figured you didn't mean to put that here. It's all good . Can we talk about how much amusement I get from this part of University of Chicago's FAQ though? Well ok then .

You got James Franco's money? lol Might I recommend the magic 8 ball? http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi

Haha I don't know if there's a real answer to this. I've seen some people say they were told to be very specific and some people say they were told to avoid being too specific. Most SOPs I've seen indicate that they want you to indicate what your interests are, but they don't always explain how detailed they want you to be. Of course, they do typically impose word count limits so I guess you can't get too detailed hehe.

I'm not in a Ph.D. program yet, but I am a TA for my MA program at Indiana State. TAs here have a 2:2 load. Typically, we teach a personal response writing class (101) in the fall and a research writing class (105) in the spring. Students have to take and pass the 101 class before they can take the 105. As a result, some TAs end up teaching 101 in the spring and 105 in the fall because some students have to repeat those classes. However, no TA has a split prep. Both classes you teach in a semester will be the same type. We use textbooks that were written by a prof in the department and there is an overall course schedule that is given to us by the director of the writing program. We're supposed to do certain chapters on certain days and collect essays at certain times throughout the semester. However, it is left up to us to plan how we're going to approach each day, what activities we use to explain the chapters or introduce the essays, etc. We also do all of the grading for our classes. The director of the writing program observes us 3 times in the first semester, 1 time in the second semester and 1 time in our second year. We had a two day orientation before school started and we were teaching right from the beginning. We took a How to TA/rhetoric/composition class in our first semester as well. The rule of the school is that undergrads have to take both of these classes if their verbal score on the SAT was less than 510. If they score above that, they can take one class that combines the two. And if they score really high, then there's an Honors version of that one class. My students typically are not overly enthused about writing, but many of them have good ideas. However, they don't always know how to put those ideas into a well-structured essay. They tend to like the personal response class better, but they tend to do better in the research class (presumably because they've had practice from the first class). It's been my experience that my afternoon classes are always better than my morning classes. Particularly, my 9am class is perpetually on the struggle bus... My undergrad degree was in English Education. At this point, I've volunteered weekly at a preschool, did student teaching and subbing at a high school, taught a year of middle school and now I'm teaching freshmen composition. The only one I want to avoid like the plague in the future? Middle school.

I don't know how much Contemporary Lit is offered in Open Courseware, but you could always look into that to fill in some of your gaps.

I can definitely say that one of the benefits of being in an MA program is that I have lot more focus, direction and understanding of what areas I want to work in, even if they are still broad. If I would've tried to go straight to the Ph.D., I think I would've been all sorts of messed up.

I think this is a good place for this hehe. I think I asked about this earlier in this thread, but I forgot to follow up on it. My interests are listed pretty broadly in my signature. More specifically, I'm interested in the role of race in feminism, particularly when coupled along with this whole "postracial" society business. I have a good deal of interest in all aspects of YA Lit (I have an education background), particularly dystopian YA Lit. Even more specifically, I'm interest in the use of race and gender in dystopian YA lit. And then there's Pop Culture. I'm a bit of a Pop Culture nerd, especially in terms of film and tv, but also in relation to celebrity culture. A lot of what I do applies theory/criticism (often African American, Feminist and/or Queer) to some aspect of Pop Culture. I'm currently working on two papers that would fall into this category, one of which I'm definitely planning to submit for possible publication. I think that, more so than anything else, I'm greatly interested in how culture comes across in film and tv. I have a hard time being super specific about this sort of thing hehe. I have too many interests for my own good I think. But essentially, I'm interested in the intersections of all those areas in my signature. Figuring out how they interact, work with each other, work against each other, etc. makes me a little bit giddy.