practical cat

Arrogance is also a kiss of death. Either way though, I am not convinced that being "off" a tenth of a point on GPA self-reporting is the end of the road. I would probably just follow standard mathematical rules for rounding.

Yeah, that. And in some ways, that made it easier. In others, aaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Oh, if only that were ANY of the questions on the test. The IDs were not: "Who wrote this poem?" "A. Percy Shelley B. Milton C. Plath D. Pound E. Chaucer." If they were like that I, who have a similar weakness in poetry from Milton to Whitman, would've been able to do quite well. They were "who wrote this poem?" with, for example, five imagists as choices.

I think there are probably a fair amount of crap writing samples in the top 1% too. (Different skill sets, conditions, and attitudes involved.) But there're enough applicants in the top 10% to allow for that.

Writing is a major focus (in, I would think, all research fields but whatever) but cheap gimmicks are not. I'm going for a bit of intrigue in mine but not for distracting.

As I noted above: yes. This isn't technically a job application process.

I think that feminist theory is totally at its 40 year point for this and it necessarily looks less like "let's recognize Jane Austen as a viable subject of literary study" but, if anything, there's even more stuff to do. Lady writers have a place like never before (I, for one, didn't much study male writers in college) but now we have to actually talk about them. And we have to talk about how we talk about them. And we 100% still completely have to justify that because we'll probably never actually live in a world where feminism is unnecessary. And that's just the lady writers.

I saw that and had a brief litigious moment (and I don't even have children). They can't ask that! But they totally can. It can't possibly be an admissions factor.

I want to know as well. I feel like if they do actually take it into consideration (and I'm not saying they don't) that it's just cruel. School X can't possibly know that School Y (despite perhaps being a better fit and higher ranked) will accept me or that I wouldn't prefer School X because their funding is WAY better, closer to people I love, whatever. It makes me feel really powerless in my own decision-making and I think this is the part of the application that actually makes me the most neurotic. And most(/all?) of my schools are asking for it.

Nailed it. I think the lines between the Humanities and the Social Sciences (deliberate capitalization to delineate them as Big Important Categories) are becoming increasingly blurry and, forgive my unapologetic Foucault love for a moment, is a function of poststructuralism. I think also that our discomfort with "progress" as a narrative (yet another function of the aesthetic and early poststructuralist theorists, right?) as opposed to, say, an evolution of inquiry is something really uniquely Theory-with-a-capital-T that we'll perhaps see dissolving as we continuously embrace "progressive" as something of an ideal. It's really tough to be uncomfortable with ideas of "progress" while still being really into the idea that BQS IS progressive, IS more advanced than we were in 19-whatever. Basically, I think the discipline is young enough and consistently redefining enough that I think you're (two espressos) kind of pointing to something that is being newly revisited as we grapple with the legacies of the post-'s.

Other disciplines haven't read their Benjamin.

I know it as not-capitalized (but I also know a lot of rogue theorists who aren't much for the shift-key in general). If you're going to capitalize Literary/Critical Theory, be consistent: Twentieth Century Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Theory. I went back and forth on it (as I reference a lot of different types of theory in my statement) and I ended up feeling like the capitalization was tedious.

Mine literally starts with the words, "I am interested in" but the sentence has something of a twist ending. I came up with a very blunt (I love bluntness in an opening sentence) but also very honest way of expressing my interests and started with that. It helped the rest flow and it's something that I can continuously gesture toward in the paper.

I'm taking "good" to be approximately "she took it and it seems that she's probably read some books before, cool." I think shooting for 650 is reasonable/normal but I don't think it's going to be the end of the world unless the final score is something like the 9th percentile. I'm also at a point where I'm really forcing a kind of aggressive optimism on myself so grain of salt.

Such a bad experience, omg. But I think it was easier than the practice ones in certain areas but similar enough so that I believe even more strongly now that it is possible to study for (I hit a few--50?--questions where I was really pleased I'd taken the time to read some sparknotes and stuff). Anyway, glad it's over and I hope everyone did really well!

This. Also, I have a writing sample that is very strongly aligned with my SOP because the writing sample is where I really got to generate these ideas for the first time. It's nowhere near fully developed in certain ideas but it's very clear that I was thinking about those things already. I also recently met with a professor who mentioned the merits of being able to think about the writing sample very critically--making the SOP in part mention what worked/didn't in the piece of writing. Not in a "man my writing sucks" sort of way but more "while framing question x in terms of y was actually pretty fruitful here, I think looking at z would be how I would want to go forward." So, basically, no. The writing sample doesn't match to the point of actually being the dissertation proposed but as the springboard, yeah. It's in no way exactly what I want to do in grad school but it is damn close and not just in terms of period/continent.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I'm going to leave it to the CV minus a line or two mention of philosophy (maybe). One of my recommenders is able to speak to my (small amount of) college teaching experience and I think her comments on my pedagogical philosophy and experience/insights will be both on point and, more importantly, not taking up SOP space.

I'm reading the emphasis on this to be on the first two-thirds. Not so much why the questions are worth asking (in other words: a defense of the discipline) but why they necessitate a doctoral program (in this specific discipline). I'm not so much advocating ignoring the question of importance but noting that some of us are inclined to be somewhat apologetic (or, on the other side of the coin, overly defensive) in the statement of interests. And as often as I read statements like Buffalo's, I read others that stress that this is not a dissertation prospectus.

My intuition is no. I don't think you need to validate literary study to literary scholars. Be confident, be straightforward, don't sound defensive. I think.

Yeah, keep what's necessary. I wouldn't keep them JUST to be demonstrative of your abilities but I wouldn't worry too much about the effect on page counts. I'm totally quoting though because this question completely blew my mind on the first read. I'm currently in the process of converting my sample from Chicago to MLA (I don't even want to talk about the horrors I have inflicted upon myself) and couldn't figure out why there'd be superfluous footnotes in the first place.

Thanks for the smile, D. Malorkus. I wish you so much more than luck. I'm using a chapter of my undergraduate thesis (that I wrote with an eye toward using as a writing sample so it's not as dreadful a surgical procedure as it could've been--current me thanks the forethought of my former self). It's pretty performative of what I'm attempting to articulate in my SOP (as it was kind of the thing that helped me to articulate my interests in the first place) and it's not in TERRIBLE shape despite what my complaining elsewhere may imply. It's just, like rems, I'm not the most confident in my idea expression ability and I'm the kind of writer that feels perpetually between drafts. It's literally in pieces on my floor (standard operating procedure--SOP!--for me). I'm fortunate in that all of the PhD programs I'm applying to are OK with 20 pages and that's what the final document is looking like it'll be (fingers crossed). For the MAs, I'm putting a little more argument in a 7 page "close reading with an argument" that I wrote concurrently with the thesis. It doesn't sing the praises of my SOP in quite the same way but, I mean, it's not unrelated.

I think proflorax raises some really important points about going into debt for applications but I think I'm still in the "it's better to have bases covered" camp. I've been in the workforce for six months now and am seriously underemployed. We talk a lot here about the job market for PhDs but we don't really talk much about the job market it general. It's certainly better than it was four years ago but I still think it's better to have too many options than to find yourself in a couple of months wishing you hadn't limited your choices so early. On the other hand, I'm spending an aimless year in my shitty hometown and it's not the end of the world that I thought it would be. (Despite being underemployed, being from a shitty town means my expenses are limited and it's been a really good way to get my student loans under control while saving money.) I say that not to say that you should do neither (lol) but to say that if you DO want to put all your eggs in the France basket, I think you'll still be able to make an omelette even if your basket falls apart. I also think it's important to note that no one has yet advised just going for the PhD and only the PhD. And we're a bunch of people who really, really want to go to grad school. I think that's telling. Don't not try to go abroad.

I would, personally, avoid strong, specific declaratives such as: "at the doctoral level, I will study the temporal and geographical dimensions of gender in the work of Virginia Woolf with a specific focus on Orlando" and would err more on the side of conditional language: "I am interested in trauma and temporality in modernist literature and would like to look at post-WWI poetry like maybe Eliot or whatever." I don't necessarily think that mentioning specifics is itself the problem. Like so much of (my perspective on) the SOP, I think it comes down to tone: do you sound like you're open to further mentorship here? You're applying to be a student, not a colleague and, though you may already know a lot about time in the 20th century, you want your SOP to perform a willingness to be taught further (without giving any ground on what you already know). Without having read your two versions, I would guess that smooshing them together might be fruitful. (I would be wary of step-by-step accounts of what's next though.) Sorry for making up research interests for you.

In this case, I would stay stick to guidelines (especially the ones that seem super strict about it like, say, UChicago) but man. I never once had an assignment that was "x pages maximum" or "between x and y pages." It was always more "x-ish pages or however long it takes you to make an argument, you do you." It's that kind of difference between institutional expectations that makes this whole thing so panic-making.

Question: Why is the SOP the worst thing in the whole entire world? Or, maybe more accurately, why is MY SOP the worst thing in the whole entire world? (Don't even get me started about editing my writing sample and leaving myself comments like "write better.")