practical cat

100% this. Context REALLY matters here.

Just submitted my first application (it was, sort of surprisingly, Wisconsin because Berkeley's personal history statement will probably be the death of me) and I feel both kind of sick and kind of relieved. It's actually kind of all down hill from here. Weird. What am I going to do for the next couple of months?

Do what you have peace about. If you're going to beat yourself up about it, it seems worth it to contact someone in the very awesome and diplomatic way proflorax suggested.

My Wisconsin one is about 530 and REALLY doesn't fit on one page. I think there can be a fair amount of differentiation based on format (and word choice) that make 50 words over really tough to distinguish on sight. I feel like the standard practice is single spaced sop, double spaced writing sample but, unless the program specifically asks for single spaced, double spacing is not really a big deal. (And I feel like I may have one program somewhere in this mess asking for double spaced so... Ymmv and all that.)

I would also be weary of professors directing more attention to the graduate students in their other/primary (depending on their appointment) discipline. It's cynical but not unheard of.

Sometimes "What You Want" from the Legally Blonde musical is the only thing that keeps me going through this process. That video fills me with joy.

It's fine. I'm sure people misspell their OWN names from time to time on applications and it's actually pretty possible that someone powering through 200 of those is not going to catch it on the first read either. You'll be fine.

Congrats! I won't really be able to submit until Sunday/Monday, but I did officially label my SOP as "final" so, eep. This is actually all happening really fast.

We had a fairly extensive discussion on this recently over on the Literature board, but I think it's best to refer to it by the full name on first mention and appropriate abbreviations each mention thereafter. University of California Berkeley first, then Berkeley. It's like referencing an author by their full name on the first mention and last name for the rest.

While an institution may admit a former undergraduate as a PhD student, that doesn't mean it won't hurt on the job market. Further, you're better off with a funded program for a PhD. If you're thinking about doing an unfunded master's at your undergrad institution, that's another thing entirely but I would not do an unfunded PhD anywhere but especially not at my undergrad.

That makes total sense to me but it's still really stressful for me with Buffalo and Rutgers and an-absent-from-email-because-of-sabbatical recommender.

I had three majors (oops) and I spent some effort in my application in not looking like that's a liability. In my SOP, I spend some time talking about methodology and how that is influenced by what I have drawn from my other degrees. My letter writers are all aware of the situation as well and I suspect that will help more than anything I could say about myself (I barely touch in my SOP about why Literature over the other two, leaving it more implicit). This is, of course, as someone applying for a field that is pretty into interdisciplinarity but I think finding ways to speak to the pros rather than the cons is pretty standard advice.

This gives me hope that my 1.5 single spaced pages of "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" will be met kindly. (Probably going to use the Chiller font.) ETA; I totally turn to gallows humor in times such as these. (Dark, dark times.)

WINGDINGS

I've always thought that was awfully pretentious. But yes. It's THE Ohio State University, OSU. Don't just call it Ohio unless you're talking trash about their football team (which you definitely should, just not on your application). Actually, with the Big Ten schools, I wouldn't call them by their state names unless I was talking about football. I wouldn't stress about it though. There's only so much insider information on how institutions self-identify that anyone can possibly/reasonably have.

Yes.

Oh, yes. I forgot about PDFs! But, yeah, don't use a sans serif font. Please.

First, check to see if there are specific requirements from any of your schools. I have a couple that are spelling out 12pt TNR pretty explicitly but sometimes that's buried or easily overlooked information. I would also consider the possibility that, since everything is submitted electronically, someone somewhere may be responsible for standardizing the font/margins of samples for easier readability (to, say, eliminate someone needing to read 300 20-page samples in a sans serif font such as Calibri). I mean, I would consider that but I'm pretty neurotic about this whole thing.

Yes. That's precisely why I don't call it such and precisely why I don't think the name should be indicative of what the field actually is! (I mean, my linguistic habit doesn't fix much more than making me feel better but bygones.) Thank you for saying it so well!

And, as I originally said, the problem with the name of the field is that it allows such assumptions to persist. Just because British literature may/may not dominate within the field as it, does not mean that's how it ought to be (and I'm not convinced it DOES dominate anymore). And the commonly-accepted name of the field is certainly an insufficient argument for that remaining as is. There's a reason I persist in referencing the field as "Literature" rather than "English" and that's because I believe that the privileging of British literature is a problem.

Your comment on German romanticism was a fairly blatant attempt at setting up a straw argument -- as my original statement had nothing to do with non-English-language literature as the British aren't the only English speakers in the world -- and I obviously shouldn't have bitten. Though my problematizing of the name does speak to my desire to blur the distinction between "English" and Comparative Literature.

If I were genuinely interested in Goethe, I'd give it a go.

Panic attacks? No. Dreams where I'm in a really high stakes fight to the death situation? Absolutely. Bird by bird, my friends. Bird by bird. I'm making tangible, concrete lists of small, manageable tasks to do each day (or not if I've allotted myself a day off like yesterday) and then, when I go to sit down and actually DO them, I clear my head of the bigger picture. I only need to get my two pages done in this writing session and that's it and it will be a real achievement that I will feel proud about. Also, OK. I was feeling this way in the beginning of the month and I cut out caffeine for fifteen days. It helped me clear my head of outside anxiety (caffeine makes me anxious) enough to regain some ability to focus. All that time I was spending worrying became time I was spending working. If there are any outside stressors that you can eliminate (especially easily!), I would give that a try. I think sometimes when we're feeling application anxiety super badly, it's not always all about the applications. To commiserate: I have five pages of a twenty page writing sample actually written, my SOP almost makes sense (but not really, you know?), I still have to write up some sort of personal history/narrative, and all of my letter writers are on sabbatical. But, OK. I don't have much control over other people, be they my letter writers or those hypothetical people submitting publishable writing samples but I do have control over myself and what I do every day. This is probably all doable.

No. There's not much work that a cover letter would do that the first three pages of the new version don't already. (That it's become apparent to me that I have now said in 3 pages what I spent 30 pages on in my thesis is something I'm trying to ignore.) There's also a tiny bit of contextualizing in my SOP so it has all been said at this point.

THIS is why the name of the field is a problem. Because it's not at all representative of what the field actually is. But the TEST is called "Literature in English," NOT "English Literature," so no. The reasoning does not still stand.