practical cat

2 MA, about 6-8 PhD. I think you can probably get a really solid sense from looking at sig tags and the school lists thread but I would guess 8-12 is about where most people fall. But number of applications has very little to do with chance of acceptance, I think. Well, unless you don't send any at all.

Long live the post-'s! (Well, except for postfeminism.)

Chicago was one of the first schools to make my "probably" list (though it's still up in the air as to whether or not it'll make the "definitely" list) even though I'm really put off by what I perceive to be the school's attitude. There're a couple of people there that I'd be really excited to get to work with despite my continued reservations about elitism. (That is NOT an attitude that works with my interests, approach, and perspective.) I guess this is more of a "spring concern" than a "fall concern" for me though.

I definitely couldn't afford study abroad so I wouldn't have been able to complete a degree had that been mandatory. - Statistical literacy. I don't think everyone needs to be able to gather and work with data but I do think we should all be able to read it. - Intro to Women's/Gender Studies. Being able to understand identity/privilege/oppression is fundamental - Upper level writing courses, beyond freshman comp

Get it, Two Espressos.

Thanks for the thoughts on the SOP. I think sometimes I get insecure because I always feel like I'm talking about myself too much. It's kind of the nature of the thing but I'm more inclined to want to tell the reader about something that I think is cool (like the 1.5 page intro I had about Lucille Ball for no discernible reason). As for the writing sample, I'm (probably) using a different one. I have to cut my 25 pager down to 20 for a couple of schools already and I really can't see getting it down to 8-12. But it is a different sort of sample and it's not quite as right as the other one.

I agree with fuzzylogician. In addition, you do not want to be giving admissions people reasons to want to disagree with you. I'm inclined to contest this even though I'm a hopeful-academic who drinks her coffee black, beer stout, and whiskey neat. Prescribing taste, no matter how tongue-in-cheek, is a little bit dangerous. You have to be pretty skillful to pull it off. I don't believe this is that.

Only always. It would 100% be the easier, less stressful option. Honestly, what helps me is reminding myself that I CAN, that no one is holding a gun to my head and making me do this. When I look very seriously and very honestly at the (very legitimate) option of quitting, it usually turns my mood around because, well, I DON'T want to quit. Except for when I do. The other thing that helps is forcing myself to work on my writing sample. When I turn to what I love about this whole thing (and turn away from that obnoxious, seemingly-pointless SOP), I know that it is right. OH, ETA: How much is everyone talking about past research in their SOP? I feel like I'm really overdoing it because I want to tell them ALL OF THE THINGS about my honor's thesis but I feel like a lot of it really points to what I want to work on in grad school.

Cosigned. I mean, I'm not feeling BAD about where I'm at but, um, I'm kind of feeling bad about where I'm at. It's in part because I'm between drafts on both documents and that just makes me feel like a mess. (My writing sample is undergoing some pretty radical transformations but my SOP is getting closer and closer to just chopping out the silly 300 word digressions on beauty and Hobbes.) It's the fact that I don't have a finalized school list that is making me want to just sit this one out. I wanted to have a real, tangible SOP draft before I started giving the school list serious consideration and I found that to be REALLY helpful. But now that I've gotten into the writing, it's all I want to do. Digging into a paper that I loved writing (and still love months later) is so much more interesting than officially crossing UNC off my list. This is all a really long, stressed-out way of saying that my writing is nowhere near finalized but I actually feel better about it than I do other things. Thank you all for making me feel less alone in all of this. Get it, gradcafe.

I did my undergrad (in English & Women's Studies) at Michigan and am more than open to PM conversations about the departments.

OK, I probably should've caught that when I wrote it. My brain must be starting to leak out of those can(n)on holes. Thanks for pointing it out, I got a good laugh. I'm considering it a win if I make the grid but I don't think this test will sink the Cornell ship entirely. ETA: Oh, and I think there's a dramatic difference between studying how to identify a passage by Samuel Richardson and studying to get a general idea of WHO Samuel Richardson was. Being able to recall, without googling, that he wrote Pamela & Clarissa is a big help to me. Reading those works, not so much. (Although I totally kind of sort of want to. Not for the test but curiosity.) I think this test has a huge "law of diminishing returns" factor and we're all going to have different points, because we all have different canon holes, where the gained utility drops enough that we stop studying and do something else.

I second what the above posters have said but I want to address tone. There are aspects to the application that you just can't change (GPA, transcripts, etc) and those facts absolutely must be accepted. You cannot approach a SOP with an attitude of "I know this looks bad, but" because you don't want to be the person that gives the people reading your application a reason to think you look bad. I would only address the positive aspects of GPA and I would explain my academic history in a way that was honest but confident. (It's possible, even, to get one of your letter writers to do this on your behalf.) You do have no way of preventing admissions committees from finding fault with any aspect of your application but you can prevent yourself from raising red flags for them. Plenty of people get into grad school who don't fit into some sort of magical numbers box and plenty of people get rejected who do. The battle is in presentation.

I would think that going with option 1 would result in weaker writing. If you have a paper that justifiably takes 55 pages to effectively argue, 20 pages is going to be very bare-bones. I would do (and in fact am doing) option 2 though with substantial revision to make that section as stand-alone as possible. I'm also including a brief abstract to indicate the positioning within the broader work and addressing my thesis in some detail in my SOP.

I disagree with this advice and don't think you should arbitrarily lengthen your sample (though maybe giving it another editorial pass might organically lengthen it--I know I always find stuff to add in revisions) but the spacing thing is absurd. You would have to have several hundred to a thousand or so sentences in your paper for that to make any concrete/noticeable difference. I spent most of my undergraduate studies doing two spaces after the period and when I would do a find/replace before handing in a paper, it would rarely shorten my paper more than a line or two. This is frankly just terrible advice on two different levels.

Agreed. If you have fairly noticeable canon-holes in your literary education, I think there's something to be gained for spending some time putting names/works to dates/periods. However, I still wouldn't place too much importance on it, especially if taking the test is a "last minute" decision. How much time you would want to devote to studying would depend on where you're at with other bits of the application, not so much on how much it would actually improve your score. I think it's worthwhile to take the test anyway just to keep your options open.

Yeah, I feel like the obsessive roller coaster of emotions is fairly typical and to be expected. Just don't do what I have spent the afternoon doing (looking at the boards from February of last cycle).

I agree with this so much. I think also that the page speaks, to me, to the overall tone that the department is trying to impress upon applicants: they're transparent, they're friendly, they're interested in a wide variety of people from all sorts of academic backgrounds. While this may be equally or more true for all other programs, I like the way that Buffalo stresses that here and elsewhere on their site. What a department chooses to emphasize changes my perspective as I dig seriously into their faculty pages and think about whether or not I'm going to apply there. It's not a make-or-break thing but I like their style and think it's refreshing.

I think relevancy really matters. If you're applying for science-type programs and are thinking about an English professor, I would say probably not. But if they can comment on your work in a way that adds something meaningful to your application and having a professor from a related field would help give a clearer picture on the kind of work you would do, maybe. But overall, I'm not really sure that a letter from someone you took one class with in a different field would be any stronger than a letter from someone you took one class with in your own field.

Looking at my notes, I know UPenn says it's "recommended but not required" and that it can totally help. Whatever that means. Either way, it's not going to save any of us from shoddy writing. I'm trying to prioritize fretting over my bad writing instead of fretting over the fact that I never read Shakespeare in college. Can't change the past but I can change my draft. I mean, I'm totally studying but I'm not approaching it with the fanaticism with which I approached the general test.

That's the worst part of the whole thing for me. I'm taking the test because one or two schools still on my "maybe" list require it. I'm brushing up on poetry from Milton to Yeats for a maybe. It kills me.

I think if you're looking to cut, don't look to cut whole paragraphs. Look instead for superfluous sentences or phrases. I think a common SOP problem is the overly-verbose "hook." A few of my earlier drafts had entire pages devoted to fluff. While it was a pace that helped me wander into content rich material, a lot of it needed to go. If you want to cut, ask yourself if each sentence adds meaning/content to the overall piece. If not, it can go. And look first and most critically at your opening paragraph(s). How much do you lose, if anything, if you chop off those first two sentences? This is not to say that sparse, terse writing is the way to go but I think using lots of language (with little meaning) as a crutch is pretty common.

I'm happy to talk about Michigan with anyone who cares to PM!

rems, I did my undergrad at Michigan and we have similar research interests. I would be willing to answer (or attempt to answer) any questions you may have about the department should you prefer to go through gradcafe over cold-emailing grad students.

Hi, all! I'm here "on break" from studying for my last final so am really only just starting to think about submersing myself in this process (though I did get the general GRE out of the way last summer and did well enough). My sympathies to those who suffered through the Lit test today and here's hoping that you all did significantly better than you expect!