zanmato4794

I really really really hope Duke notifies today. Unlikely that they will, and unlikely that I'd get in, but I'm hungry for news!

Haha sorry. The mystery was killing us. Congratulations though! To be in easy driving distance of DC and all the resources there would really be something.

My guess is it's hypervodka.

I live about four hours from the school where I did my M.A., and my boyfriend still lives in that area. If I get accepted, I'm basically driving down as soon as I can, putting thank-you cards (filled in with the good news of course) with an amazon gift card in my writers' department mailboxes, and then visiting my boyfriend to tell him in person where we'll be living this fall. Kind of a hell of a drive, but it feels right, I think. Plus I love any excuse to visit the town where I went to grad school. Edit: Not that I planned this out months ago and have been obsessively fantasizing about it ever since or anything. No no no. Nothing like that.

A system of posting etiquette should be established! Post acceptances in English forum first for your loyal and supportive fans, then let the gradcafe members of those other filthy practical disciplines see your accomplishments.

I'm thinking I really messed up the fit issue. Most of my fit statements are small one- or two-sentence clusters affixed to parts of my core letter where they seem to make sense. In no letter did I set aside an entire paragraph for fit. I know I was going against the grain with this, and now that it's nearly decision time I'm of course overcome with doubts, but there was something about writing the fit sections that seemed... inauthentic to me? I meant what I wrote, but in many cases, if I had gone on any longer, I would have felt like a kiss-ass. I don't see it mentioned in the English forums a lot, but elsewhere on the site, the "show" versus "tell" model of SOP-writing seems to be popular. I might just roofie myself repeatedly until mid-Feb.

At times like this, I am quite glad that I have an extremely, extremely common name, and what's more, it's a semi-famous person's name also. I can't find myself on Google much of the time, even if I Google my name plus things from my past, like universities I've attended.

This is a difficult question for me. I grew up in a politically moderate, perhaps even slightly forward-looking suburb--more forward-looking with regard to sexuality than race, at any rate and unfortunately. (I am white, so that's not part of the difficulty here--I'm just trying to give you guys an idea of the place.) My problems having grown up gay never really involved direct persecution for sexuality. My mother could have handled it better, but now she makes blowjob jokes all the time so I guess she's okay with it. My friends said, "good, now no one can accuse our friends group of anything"--strange response, but not bad for me personally. However, there were indirect stress factors from it. I was never persecuted, as I said, for being gay, but I did certainly miss out socially on not being "one of the guys." I was clearly different, and being different meant being marginalized to some extent, especially in my early teens and then again when I went to a Jesuit university. (It is odd, by the way, to be able to identify easily the biggest mistake of your life.) Everyone has social difficulties growing up, but mine were kind of part of a larger system of things that sucked: clear but difficult to diagnose mental illness, very rough family situation, extreme social anxiety. Together those things really alienated me for much of my life and so a lot of the time I do not have very good emotional supports, and the whole sexuality thing just seems like another level of being different, another way of not fitting in, and when I finally did embrace my sexuality, I found no one to embrace it with--I was in a gay vacuum throughout high school and undergrad. It is extremely frustrating to watch all of your straight friends go from relationship to relationship while you think of other gays as either evil nemeses or fantastic unattainable unicorns, and even though you might tell yourself that you shouldn't blame yourself for essentially being a victim of statistics (if there are no gays there are no gays to date), you somehow do end up blaming yourself sometimes anyway. So: my main "diversity" focus is mental illness because that is what really bothers me, what really has put me through some difficult times, but it certainly has been inflected by my sexuality. I do not reveal or even hint that I'm gay in any of my applications except for the one for UC Santa Barbara because they basically straight up ask you what categories you fit into, yet I have the distinct feeling that someone reading my writing would guess that I was gay anyway. I am interested in queer theory and gay literature, but all of my forays into each have fallen rather flat. There aren't many gay novels I enjoy, and while I've read some theory, it's mostly the extremely common, at this point basically canonical stuff. I will, however, recommend Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask. I read it earlier this summer and really went crazy over it. It's very dark though, and not very romantic. I also recommend reading about Mishima's life (his Wikipedia entry suffices) along side it--very strange, very tortured, very talented man.

B.A. from a small jesuit not-fun-to-be-gay-at liberal arts university basically unheard of outside of my state. My transcripts are embroidered with two lovely D's my first semester, five withdrawals over the years, and a ninth semester which screams that I hate core requirements (especially when two religious studies courses are required of all students). Considering that I was a complete train-wreck my entire time there (my boyfriend says I live fuck-up to fuck-up), it's kind of a miracle I got a 3.45 GPA and 3.6 in my major. M.A. from a well-known state party school. Got my junk together and earned the only 4.0 in my literature cohort. GRE: V 170, Q 161, AW 5.0 Subject: 640 I think awards will help my application. I got department best essay awards my junior and senior years of undergrad, and won best seminar paper and best thesis my second year of my master's program. I have a publication forthcoming, but only one conference presentation--and a minor conference at that. I did some presentations at both universities I attended, but I don't think those really count. Mostly I suck at extrovert things. I almost fainted my first day teaching. My interests: Coetzee, Nabokov, Joyce, Morrison, Beckett, Eugenides, Diaz, Foucault; video games, translation, mental illness, the novel, erotica, monsters, affinities between literature and other media (doctrine of the similar). Personal Statement: blah blah i'm crazy and it helps me write stuff. Caveat to my WS: I am notoriously untrendy in all aspects of my life, so I think you'll notice a lack of trendy-sounding terms or ideas in my description of my WS. Every time I try to do what other people are doing or what's cool, I mess up. I've always been one of those people who should just be left alone to do his thing. This is the abstract for my WS: This article interrogates the curious dismissal of madness from the critical landscape surrounding J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, and makes suggestions concerning how madness works in the novel and why—given certain critical and historical pressures—it has been persistently sidelined. An analysis of the novel in light of Coetzee’s scholarship on Samuel Beckett suggests that Magda’s discourse, like those of many Beckettian narrators, follows patterns of affirmation and auto-negation, constituting a fiction of what Coetzee calls “net zero.” In particular, Magda extends this pattern to the taking on and casting off of identities, perhaps in the style of the hermit crab she puts forward as an image of herself. An intertextual examination of the semantic and rhetorical range of madness as it appears in Coetzee’s other fiction and scholarship reveals that madness, for Coetzee, consistently denotes: on the one hand, a contagious force moving throughout a social body, and on the other hand, the labor of writing under the threat of illegibility—a threat conditioned in large part by the madness of the social body. By infecting the writer who might record its workings in history and thereby inhibiting or distorting that record, madness likewise appears in historical record as “net zero.” Thus, rather than simply being mad, Magda’s relationship with madness is emblematic of the (dis)appearance of madness in and from history. I feel my odds of an acceptance--given that I applied only to four schools and have many odd things about my applications--are slightly less than 50%.

I've been surprised at how few--yes, few--applications some programs get. I always had the impression that every school got 300+, that being on the low end. I was pleasantly surprised with UCSB's relatively few applicants, but a little bothered by the discrepancy between in-state and out-of-state acceptance rates. I wonder if in-state preference is very common, or if this is just kind of an isolated case of the UC system favoring their own. PhD programs are supposed to be my ticket far far away!

now i have them! i... shouldn't complain about a 640, but seeing as though i got a 620 five years ago, i'm a little bummed. i just wish i had known to go faster.

WHAT?! my scores aren't up!

Most of these fall flat, but a few are real treasures: http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/medieval-beasts-that-cannot-even-handle-it-right-now

oh gosh you're right! those jerks!

hypervodka, I cannot overstate how valuable those are.

Meanwhile, you know they totally have them.

I just have the title at the very top and my last name in the header. it looks pleasing, to my eye, and it allows you to get an extra few lines out of your page limit!

I think this list should be your writing sample. Edit: almost all of these are just in time to make or break my birthday.

1Q84, I read your post while I was at work, and so did not reply (almost typed "apply!") then, but I agree with the others: apply. i'll speak only for myself, but I know that I won't be my sane rational self again until after spring when I know my fate, and so I don't trust my decisions regarding graduate school from here out. I've already caught myself considering waiting another year to be more ready--and I have a lot of shit under my belt--just because I was panicking. plus: if you apply and get into a school, even if it isn't one of those top schools, you might still kind of feel badass about having potentially been a serious competitor in that process.

Your career is not over. I do agree with others that you should try contacting this professor. He or she must know that s/he's potentially foreclosing a possible avenue of your future by letting that grade remain. You literally have nothing to lose by contacting this professor. But let's say worse-case scenario: the F remains. My feeling is that you could still get into a PhD program, perhaps not a top twenty program, but perhaps also not too far below that. The remainder of your application would have to be rather eccentric: high scores, high marks in other classes, outstanding rec letters, a few awards or other accomplishments. If you polish everything else up well enough, that F will say more about the professor who gave it than it will about you.

Hello, Most Beautiful Forum Members: I thought I would start a positive-like topic to keep us happy during our time of stress. Why did you all study English? (And by all means: brag a little. This is also about why you deserve to study English.) Back in eighth grade I was kicked out of Honors English. Nothing could make me do my homework. Why do homework when I could play Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games without end? Throughout high school, I played video games with strong narrative arcs and wrote stories like video games starring my friends. During my junior and senior years, I was allowed back into Honors English, but I still would not do my homework. At one point during junior year, my teacher left a message on my parents' answering machine because I was failing the class. Strangely, throughout high school, I was really into foreign languages. I took French and German all four years, yet the passion for language I felt there only tied back to English at the very end of my high school career. My AP English Composition teacher (the same lady who was failing me junior year) suddenly presented English in a new way that made it more than it had ever been before. In my earlier classes, it seemed, success in English depended upon a student's ability to do worksheets. If you were in regular English you had one sheet for homework. If you were in Honors, you had three. Work ethic: that was what English really was. Yet at the very end of my high school career, English became something else. All those silly hormones I had been building up, all the angst I felt at being the typical outcast (as well as being the only gay "out" at a reasonably-sized high school), found expression at last in the writing exercises we had to do. English went from being my least favorite to my favorite subject. (A point of pride: I was the first student to get a 5 on the AP exam that my teacher ever had, which was a shock to her since I had been, essentially, such a horrible student.) And suddenly, the interests I thought had nothing to do with each other--video games and foreign languages--seemed to have everything to do with each other. If someone had told my sixteen-year-old self he would want to be an English professor one day, he would've roundhouse-kicked that person in the face. Yet as soon as I took my first literature course at university, and especially after I read Toni Morrison's Beloved as part of that course, I became ecstatic about that decision, and ever since then, I have only become more attached to this field with every work I read.

While there are exceptions and, I believe, exceptions that stand out more in most applicants' minds than they should (for reasons I'm not going to get into here), I think you may want to retake the GRE. A low GRE usually needs to be balanced out by a high GPA, or vice versa, but both numbers in your case are slightly lower than what the average acceptance will look like. If you have won awards, have extenuating circumstances to talk about, or some other eccentric aspect to your application, it could very well outweigh any number in your applications, but if not, you must keep in mind that you will be in competition with students who have high numbers, great recs, awards under their belts, and stellar writing samples. How do you plan to compete with them? (This is not a sassy rhetorical question. I am asking you--and asking you to ask yourself--why admissions committees should take you over other applicants with stronger numbers.) I know I sound discouraging in that last paragraph, but I have the impression--and I'm basing it off of little here, I know--that you could use another year to define your interests more clearly, figure out what departments will suit you long before the winter deadlines, and bring your GRE scores up. Am I correct in sensing that you are still finishing a degree currently? A year off really works wonders, not only for your application, but for your finances, emotional stability, and personal life. Also: much of my pessimism here is with the idea that you're applying to a PhD or combined MA/PhD program, both of which have more stringent attitudes toward applicants than do terminal MA programs. If you are applying to some terminal MAs, which you could use as a stepping stone and a way to get a new GPA and some accomplishments under your belt, I think you may have a more realistic shot.

I'm going to be honest. It's actually really getting to me. The application season in addition to the new job I started over the summer is making me drink a bit more than I'd like to. I'm saving up as much money as I can now so that if I get accepted, I can quit my job a full month before I start my program and, for the first time since I can remember, chill out.

Oh, how I wish I didn't check every day to see if scores somehow magically appeared way earlier than ETS says they will.