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I received word on Tuesday from the University of Wisconsin at Madison that my application to their Communication Arts - Media and Cultural Studies PhD was rejected. This was disappointing (I ate a pizza and watched The Flash in my darkened room after work, which I'd have done anyway, but that's not the point) but wasn't a huge surprise to me for a few reasons. The first reason was that their MCS division had been shrunk significantly in the previous years and only had about half of the spots available of the next smallest program. This is a trend in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) as higher education is being gutted (as it is nationwide). This is particular to the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences. Now I can prattle on about neoliberalism and the commodification of education in the United States, but I'd rather talk about myself. So, additionally, I suppose I may not have been the best fit for my prospective POI, despite the interest I perceived through our email correspondence. It could have been my abysmal undergraduate GPA (3.06. Never enter college thinking you'll be a doctor when all you made were Bs and Cs in science and math in high school. As I've mentioned, I'm not much of a planner.) or the fact that my two MAs had nothing to do with communications. Whatever the reason, they didn't want me. So, now I wait for the remaining six to render their judgment. I continue to have Rambo-esque flashbacks of last year when I got completely shut out. To paraphrase Frank Reynolds: "Wisconsin drew first blood!"

Hello, I'm am seeking a sharp, artsy, philosophically sophisticated, writting oriented person to help push a manuscript to potential. The project is a one act play dealing with lacanian psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. Any interest? It could be a paid position (I can afford $50 an hour for the right person) Thank you in advance! Moss

Hi, all – I apologize in advance if any of my questions are glaringly obvious, but I require gradcafe wisdom on submitting a multimedia essay to PhD programs in English literature and similar disciplines like cultural/media studies. As a point of reference, my essay examines the ideological edifice of two Steve Bannon documentaries, Torchbearer and Generation Zero, and draws on the theoretical framework of S. Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. Such analysis requires that I embed clips from either film as textual evidence, and the platform I decided upon was WordPress, buying my own domain to give a little autonomy to the project. To start, how do different PhD programs deal with this type of submission? I'm sure disciplines like media studies have pretty clear-cut protocol for what I'm describing, but I'm not sure how English literature programs might differ, if at all, but they're my main point of interest here, so it'd help to receive as much knowledge as I can on the subject. Further, might there be an advantage to briefly describing relevant scenes in my essay, as Žižek so often does, in lieu of embedded clips? On the one hand, this move would streamline the complication by maintaining a purely textual essay; on the other hand, I can't possibly imagine paraphrasing a literary text, e.g. Ulysses, for an entire paper without losing rhetorical effect on some demonstrative level. (Good grief, I never thought I would ever align Joyce and Bannon in a metaphorical capacity – I think I may need an ice-cold shower, or perhaps a holy water blessing from Dr. Buck Mulligan himself.) If you're so inclined, I also have a few less-pressing questions: 1) Preferentially, is WordPress the best platform for a multimedia essay such as mine? 2) How does one formalize your page-count with embedded videos, or does this ultimately not matter as much as word-count when submitting to programs? 3) Submitted multimedia essays should preclude peripheral or paratextual content, like expository "About" tabs, right? Thanks everyone!

Hi, all – I apologize in advance if any of my questions are glaringly obvious, but I require gradcafe wisdom on submitting a multimedia essay to PhD programs in English literature and similar disciplines like cultural/media studies. As a point of reference, my essay examines the ideological edifice of two Steve Bannon documentaries, Torchbearer and Generation Zero, and draws on the theoretical framework of S. Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. Such analysis requires that I embed clips from either film as textual evidence, and the platform I decided upon was WordPress, buying my own domain to give a little autonomy to the project. To start, how do different PhD programs deal with this type of submission? I'm sure disciplines like media studies have pretty clear-cut protocol for what I'm describing, but I'm not sure how English literature programs might differ, if at all, but they're my main point of interest here, so it'd help to receive as much knowledge as I can on the subject. Further, might there be an advantage to briefly describing relevant scenes in my essay, as Žižek so often does, in lieu of embedded clips? On the one hand, this move would streamline the complication by maintaining a purely textual essay; on the other hand, I can't possibly imagine paraphrasing a literary text, e.g. Ulysses, for an entire paper without losing rhetorical effect on some demonstrative level. (Good grief, I never thought I would ever align Joyce and Bannon in a metaphorical capacity – I think I may need an ice-cold shower, or perhaps a holy water blessing from Dr. Buck Mulligan himself.) If you're so inclined, I also have a few less-pressing questions: 1) Preferentially, is WordPress the best platform for a multimedia essay such as mine? 2) How does one formalize your page-count with embedded videos, or does this ultimately not matter as much as word-count when submitting to programs? 3) Submitted multimedia essays should preclude peripheral or paratextual content, like expository "About" tabs, right? Thanks everyone!