Fishbucket

How did the acceptance freakout thread become about people getting rejections over the phone? This is making me sad

I think it really depends on what kind of lifestyle you're comfortable with. I sadly am not the best at managing my finances, and I've never had to live on such a tiny income in my life. During my gap years I made about 3x the UT stipend working in advertising (among other jobs). I enjoy experiencing the life of the city I live in (wherever that city may be), going out to movies, buying nice groceries, being able to eat at restaurants sometimes, in other words having a bit of breathing room after paying rent. I would feel incredibly sad and uncomfortable scrimping and scraping by on less than $1000 a month after taxes.

What about being single in grad school? This is also traumatic.

I wouldn't count tuition remission as a part of pay. The only income that counts is the income you're getting in your pocket.

The truth is, the best programs with the best placement records tend to have the best resources available for their grad students. They aren't generally the ones paying poverty wages. The standard funding package at top-10 schools is $20-25k plus summer funding and no teaching until at least the 2nd year.

No, what I was saying is I'd like to make enough money that I don't qualify for foodstamps. I'd like to not need government welfare assistance in order to get a graduate degree.

It looks like Yale and Harvard have already sent out acceptances. Are you considering those as implicit rejections yet?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally would prefer not to fall into that cliché of the PhD Humanities student on foodstamps.

And in terms of the definition of poverty, for a single person an income of $12,000 is the poverty line. If you're in a couple with no children the level is $15,000. So based purely on the numbers, the UT-Austin stipend is poverty wages.

Excuse me, I was using figurative language. What I mean is that I don't think anyone (apart from the independently wealthy, for whom stipends aren't really a concern to begin with) will be comfortable in a program in which they have to struggle to survive financially while also teaching and developing a dissertation. Programs don't "love" anyone, and even individual professors who do love their students don't really have the power to make them financially solvent. These are 5-7 long years, and I just don't think that $13,000 is enough to allow a person any degree of stability or security. On top of that, even first years at UT-Austin have to teach, so they really are being underpaid for a legitimate and valuable service. It all just sounds awful to my ears.

No matter how much you love a program, if a program doesn't love you enough to pay you a living wage I would wonder how great a "fit" that could possibly be. Like Swagato says, it really depends on what your other options are. But I would assume that the glossy sheen of a program right now, before you start struggling to make rent and pay down loans, will quickly dissipate once real life woes start interfering with your intellectual productivity.

By the way, here's a description of that experiment if anyone is interested: http://explorable.com/cognitive-dissonance-experiment

This is exactly what I mean. Do you go to UT? How do you make ends meet?

Have you ever heard of that experiment where they ask people to do a simple task and pay them either $5 for it or $20? And the people being paid less rate their enjoyment of the task higher. It's a measure of cognitive dissonance. Maybe part of why a lot of UT PhD students are so aggressively effusive about their level of happiness is cognitive dissonance? I assume they must work other jobs in order to feed themselves, since $13 is way below the poverty line.

I just started the Fat Studies Reader and I was wondering if anyone on this forum had any thoughts about the field of Fat Studies?

That's not a very competitive funding package when you consider that most top-10 programs offer about 10k more. I didn't realize there was such a funding gap.

I'm currently enrolled in a terminal master's program in Spanish and Portuguese literature at Stanford. I want to continue my education and eventually become a professor of Comp Lit. I'm planning to apply in December for a PhD, and so I've started putting together my applications. But I feel stuck on the SoP for the following reason: I don't know what I want to focus on, within the discipline. I haven't started my master's program yet (it begins in September). I've been out of school for 2 years, between undergrad and now. I know very definitely that I want to study in the field of Comparative Literature, I want to immerse myself in philosophy and literary theory and untranslated foreign literature. I've studied French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and I want to study German, so those are probably the upper limit of the languages I know I can/will be working in (plus English, of course). I know that I'm particularly fascinated by Brazil, France, and German-language literature. I have various favorite writers from each of these languages (Ex: Machado de Assis, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust) But 1. I don't have a coherent single topic which links all of these interests and writers together; and 2. I don't feel like I know enough about anything yet to see where my interests will lead me. I fully expect my interests and focus to change, a lot, once I'm enrolled in a PhD program. So what should I do? How do I consolidate everything I'm interested in, with how very little I really know about Comparative Literature, into a great SoP? Thanks for reading my post.