Quamvis

Well, further good news: the third committee member, whom I was unduly terrified of asking if he would ever write for me as he went to a very prestigious program himself, agreed to write! I am going ahead and applying to two or three schools this year, with full awareness that it could be highly unlikely that I will get in anywhere at all, but he did say that no one thing on a transcript will be an inevitable death-knell if the overall story of the candidate and his or her abilities with Latin and Greek (and research, though again I wasn't always the best at rapidly producing that) are commendable. I do enjoy secondary level teaching, as I said, though I teach middle school in addition to high school, which can be exceedingly stressful, and I am also in a part of the country with what is not really a sustainable cost of living and I would rather use the money I do have saved up for making it through graduate school than for continuing to live here.

Well, good news: two of my thesis committee members said they'd be happy to write for me, and that if I frame things appropriately my blemishes shouldn't be such a huge problem with some programs. I am continuing to make progress with revising and condensing my thesis into an article; I've tried to come to terms with the fact that reading more Greek and Latin past a certain point is in some ways a waste of time in a very research-driven modern academia (and writing is the important thing). But, if I may ask, how did all of you get around the feeling that nothing one writes in Classics can really be "original research"? For my thesis I took an angle at an issue in Theocritus that I actually couldn't find any other scholar taking, and the committee found it compelling, but I always have this feeling that nearly ever paper should be "original" in some sense, though that's actually impossible. Certainly few of mine actually were; but for the dissertation one is of course required to do "original research" on a massive scale. Also, on the note of time spent honing writing skills versus time spent reading Greek and Latin: it strikes me as sad in some ways that many professors I have had have said they never actually read every line of every work on their PhD or MA reading lists, but I suppose in some ways that it is wise to acknowledge that while ideally we all should try as hard as possible to meet that standard, grad school really IS about producing research rather than about reading, and once one's Greek and Latin is fluent enough to translate anything at sight it may be a wiser use of time not to try to reading literally every page of everything on a reading list when one could be starting early on a thesis or dissertation.

Yes, and also there is simply the allure of teaching the big lecture classes like myth and Roman history-- lecturing is, at least from observing my very famously animated and hilarious undergrad myth prof at Alabama, very fun and rewarding if done right (although large classes like that no doubt have their own frustrations, as that a job will always in some way be just a job and therefore not something one is always thrilled to do). Also, so far as the job market, etc., goes, though I would never go to grad school again without full funding like the MA program gave, money is thankfully not so much of any issue for me: I'm not wealthy per se, but I'm very financially blessed and also have a family business to fall back on. I know I am going to give getting the PhD a shot since I won't be happy with myself otherwise; I just have to remember that those B's significantly lower my chances of getting in anywhere. . . Does anyone know if doing a second MA and not making the same mistakes I made last time would be an answer? Or is it impossible to gain two terminal MA's in the same field?

Well, there is, I think a certain depth of discussion of the literature that can't be had on the secondary level in the way it can in teaching upper-level language courses on the university level-- although to be honest, now that I think more carefully about what I am saying, even the very highest upper-level classes I had in undergrad very rarely delved that deeply into the literary aspects of the texts, since often people were not so highly prepared as translators. I try to incorporate as much as I can of literary history and so forth into secondary teaching, to get the students to really see Classics as a literary tradition, though of course they usually aren't at the level of reading comprehension with Latin to be able to really take the time for those discussions until the third year. Perhaps I should remember that it is a very rare professor who gets to teach graduate seminar level courses where one can really spend large amounts of time on the literary aesthetics of Classics.

Thanks for the responses. To answer the point about difficulty writing-- I have taken steps to remedy that, making myself write (or expand old papers) in my leisure time to practice, and have been reworking parts of my thesis into an article to submit to a journal. Perhaps, however, I should be more realistic about what getting a B at all says about me-- although in reality much of that was due to plain out laze/procrastination + the inevitable grad school depression/burnout. The main reason I feel so invested in going on for a PhD is that I have put in so many hours at this point with the languages, as well as the fact that in undergrad I was told I could get into a very good PhD program straight out of undergrad, but then due to family circumstances which led to my depression and the PhD application deadline passing I ended up at Arizona for two years instead. I enjoy high school teaching, but in no way can it be as rewarding as teaching on the university level (not that the job market makes getting a job at the university that realistic of a shot for many people).

Hi all, I ended up doing a terminal masters (philology) at Arizona rather than going straight into a PhD program from undergrad, despite the fact that I had enough credits to do the latter (various stressors came up my senior year of undergrad which resulted in me not meeting PhD deadlines and I was encouraged to just apply for the MA so I wouldn't go outside the field too long), and I am now teaching Latin on the secondary level in New York. Does anyone know, barring recommenders dying or something, whether time off from grad school, as long as it is spent teaching and reading on one's own (I am making my way through the whole Harvard reading list while off, and my eventual goal is to read all of classical pagan poetry in the original and before I die the whole corpus-- lofty, I know!) is detrimental to getting back into academia between the MA and PhD? Also, more embarrassingly, due to unwisely taking on a way heavier load than I was prepared for at Arizona (I took four classes and TA'ed or taught almost every semester, including the one I was writing my thesis) I made two B's solely due to papers being slightly shorter than they should have been-- my recommenders all know I am very well-grounded in the languages, but I do struggle time to time with cranking out large amounts of academic prose under overloaded conditions-- does that destroy my chances almost everywhere? Me pudet hoc fateri, but, as I said, I unwisely took on a lot, but I nonetheless have made myself read very large amounts of both Greek and Latin (Aeneid straight through eight or nine times, all of Lucan, all of the Metamorphoses, all of the Odyssey, most of Statius, most of the elegiac corpus, + all the stuff on AZ's reading list). I am also editing my thesis to try to publish it so my name is out there. Thanks for your thoughts/help!

I will be applying to Classical Philology PhD programs this fall with 3 years of upper-level Latin (I tested into the 300 level when I swapped from English to Classics as my major; 300 level here = undiluted Vergil, Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, selected medieval authors, and Lucretius), three years of Greek (keep in mind that the first year was all introductory stuff from Athenaze; by 201 and 202 we were reading the New Testament and then Plato's Apology; 301 and 302 will be Sophocles and Homer, and, if we finish those selections, possible some Hellenistic stuff too), 2 years of French, and 2 summer semesters of German. After this fall I will have added a semester of Modern Greek on the 200-level as well. My GPA is good overall and I've never made less than an A in any language class; however, my transcript contains the major blemish of a D in Roman Art. I scored one of the top slots in the National College Greek exam (for first year Greek). I hope this all doesn't sound terribly pompous and overblown-- I personally think that my achievements are only average given what I'll have for competition when applying to good graduate programs. My GRE verbal score is nearly perfect, but my quantitative score is only 138 (yikes!), and I fear that I'll be applying against people who have four rather than three years of Greek. Also, I'm applying from the deep south, which definitely isn't seen as being an epicenter of Classics on the national level. I'm still whittling away on my writing sample, and there is of course no way to know whether or not any particular admissions committee will or will not like what I have to say about a particularly obscure passage of Vergil. So what are my chances? Please be as blunt and as realistic as possible.