2019 Applicants

[lyonel_]

18 minutes ago, jadeisokay said:

i went blue in the face explaining how funding and dissertations and everything work at the last gathering i went to this year.  and of course i was still asked after what exactly i was thinking majoring in english. sigh.

no matter what, this is every english/lit. major. 

[jadeisokay]

heaven forbid i wanted to study something i enjoy!

[lyonel_]

10 minutes ago, jadeisokay said:

heaven forbid i wanted to study something i enjoy!

I feel everyone here has had the same conversation, or close to, so that's worth something, right?

[disidentifications]

2 hours ago, kendalldinniene said:

A) Lauren Berlant

Between this thread and the other on books, it seems like half the comments from this year's applicants are just us (virtually) yelling "Lauren Berlant!!" at each other... ?
(To be fair, the awe she inspires isn't at all unjustified.)

23 minutes ago, jadeisokay said:

within my extended family just graduating college is a big deal so i feel like a total anomaly. i went blue in the face explaining how funding and dissertations and everything work at the last gathering i went to this year.  and of course i was still asked after what exactly i was thinking majoring in english. sigh. 

I definitely empathise. At this point, my family's still pretty confused about the funding situation, even though I've attempted, repeatedly, to explain it to them. And their confusion only exacerbates whenever I tell them about the frightfully low acceptance rates for PhD programs, not to mention the even more terrifying job prospects that I'll face after graduating from one. (I don't know where, or how my parents got the impression that being a professor's a glamorous job!! *side-eyes tenured professors, with their cushy incomes and job security*) 

I suppose I'm lucky to have my wonderful mentors to talk to and keep me sane in this period of time, even though I sometimes feel like they have far too much confidence in my abilities. Perhaps this is just the imposter syndrome talking, but perhaps my worries aren't unfounded — we'll see when the admissions results roll in... 

[jadeisokay]

oh yeah,  the difference between undergrad and grad admissions is also a frequent exhausting topic of discussion. while i deeply appreciate my mom's insistence that i am fabulous and can absolutely get accepted to my dream school because i'm amazing, i still want to hand her a print out outlining acceptance rates and job prospects. (god, if she finds this... i'm sorry mom, you're still the best.) 

[disidentifications]

@jadeisokay this is exactly how I feel!! And even if I do bring out the numbers, it's still hard to imagine what 3-7% of all applicants really entails.
I'm not the sort to get other's hopes up until I am certain I can fulfil their expectations, so I've been trying to prepare my parents for the very likely event that I should fail to get into any school, but they seem to think that I'd easily make the top "3-7%". If only they knew how many indeterminable factors play into admissions decisions!! (If only I really knew too!!! But alas...) 

[The Wordsworthian]

@jadeisokay @flungoutofspace Oh my goodness, my mom does the same thing.  Last night I was visiting home and she was like "So if you got into all of your schools--" and I just stopped her right there.  Not happening, mom. 

[pdh12]

yesss, not to mention the huge subjectivity factor that goes into admin decisions —with STEM you get your quantifiable scores and know where you’ll ‘rank’, but humanities is a different animal. there’s really no knowing til the end. 

[Bopie5]

3 hours ago, The Wordsworthian said:

she was like "So if you got into all of your schools--" and I just stopped her right there.

Oh my gosh! The amount of times I’ve gotten that question from various friends and family members. I’m always like “Guys, I’ll be lucky to get into one.”

[havemybloodchild]

14 hours ago, Bopie5 said:

Ugh this is beyond true. Since it's holiday break, and I don't have as much to do, I've been spending far too much time on here, and I can't tell if it's quelling or exacerbating my nervousness and stress! But it is comforting to know all of you are experiencing some of the same feelings I am, especially since none of my friends are pursuing graduate school right now, and don't totally understand the visceral anxiousness this process can foster.

This.  No one in my life quite gets what I'm going through - a friend of mine told me I shouldn't be anxious about my applications because the anxiety isn't "useful."  ?

While I definitely feel anxious reading through these threads, it's also so helpful to see I'm not the only one feeling such terror and joy awaiting the results of all of our hard work.

[mandelbulb]

i've told my family (and my roommate) not to ask about my applications from here on that if there's no news, it's bad news and i don't want to talk about it. until then i'm going to distract myself with movies and friend dates and puppies. (this is a hint for anyone with a pet to feel free to attach one picture to every one of your messages--to help us all with our anxiety!)

i was actually thinking back to when i first discovered affect theory in my first quarter of my MA. it was really weird because on the one hand, i'd never really experienced theory in literature/film before. on the other hand, i knew about psychoanalysis from my history of psych class and all the smack we talk in evidence-based treatments about "talk therapy" (like psychoanalysis), and i was also familiar with affect because of my line of work. affect theory was the thing that married together all of my broad research interests. it seemed like a missing piece to me that i'd never known was missing lol 

when did all of you bump into your research interests for the first time?

[conraddy]

Hey guys! First time posting here. I'm still in the process of finishing up my second writing sample for the Harvard app that's due in two days - fml - but then I'll FINALLY be done with the whole application process. This cycle I only applied to 5 dream programs, thinking that it really wouldn't be too terrible to take a year off, get some helpful feedback, and cast out a bigger net on the second go-round. But we'll see, maybe I'll get lucky. Like some of you have said, I've basically resigned to the fact that I won't get in anywhere, because the anxiety was eating. me. alive. I really relate to the problems of relatives putting too much wind in your sails.. If only they knew how much worse that makes it! Especially because it makes me feel pressured to live up to the image that other people have of my intelligence or "potential," whatever that even means. All around, it's too much. 

I think it's fair to say I'm planning on taking a more traditional approach than most of you here. My interests kind of satellite around the intellectual history of the 19th century and the impacts that shifts in cultural attitudes towards science and religion had for the individual experience... there seems to be this emergence of characters who are basically egomaniacs and who embody the zeitgeist of scientific progressivism, but then go absolutely bonkers. Even when the authors aren't religious at all, they tend to describe those characters in religious language, so I'm curious about what the hold up is, and about what it might signal about inhospitable conditions for human wellbeing. @mandelbulb I'm not sure there was a specific moment when I bumped into this topic, but reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a Brit Lit survey class my junior year of undergrad played a pretty major role. 

Anyways, I better get back to it. This writing sample isn't going to revise itself. Best of luck to all of you guys, I'm sure this thread's gonna be filled with good news!

(Tried to upload a pic of my dog but the file was too big /:)

[disidentifications]

10 hours ago, mandelbulb said:

when did all of you bump into your research interests for the first time?

I can't really say when I first read A Room of One's Own (it was ages ago), but besides its message, I remember being so taken by Woolf's wit and language that I immediately started looking for, and poring through everything else that she's ever written. Certainly, there's much to admire and discuss in her novels (which explains my honors thesis topic), but it was always her non-fiction — her essays, letters, diaries, memoirs — that charmed me. Her words just brim with such personality that I couldn't help but seek the person behind them, so that led me to Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf (which I, too, fell in love with), and then her other books on life-writing... I guess that, and my general curiosity in the gossipy particulars of writer's lives (especially those of women writers), was what then cumulated in my current research interest in women's life-writing. 

10 hours ago, mandelbulb said:

i knew about psychoanalysis from my history of psych class and all the smack we talk in evidence-based treatments about "talk therapy" (like psychoanalysis)

On a side note, this really cracked me up, because my best friend's a psychologist who can't tolerate any serious mention of Freud, whereas half — if not all — of the work I do now can be traced, in one way or another, to his theories... so she teases me a lot about it. 

[WildeThing]

On 12/31/2018 at 10:18 PM, mandelbulb said:

when did all of you bump into your research interests for the first time?

I mean, my research interests have progressed ever since high school really. But really, I had never considered African-American literature (it wasn't really taught much at my university) until I did my MA in the US. By then I had already delved into trauma and psychoanalysis but I really got into it there, and wound up shaping my entire MA around it. Had I applied out of my BA I would have argued for some mishmash of post-WII drama, Samuel Beckett, and early 20th c. white male authors. I haven't touched any of those since I left. Sometimes I'll see faculty whose work I read or sounds interesting in relation to those interests but since it doesn't fit in the SoP it gets cut.

Also, I have been obsessing over these apps now that we're in 2019, which, in case you didn't realize, is the same year we would be starting our PhDs, should we get accepted. Like, holy shit. In similar Panicville news, it's fucking January 2019. First responses could be out in about two weeks (I've got Emory down as a mid-late January interview notifier). Most if not all the places I've applied were done notifying acceptances by the end of February, which is NEXT MONTH. Why is no one else here? Panicking? I've been living on a diet of school reviews, undergrad acceptance reaction compilations, program websites, and gradcafe deepdives for the past few days.

Lastly, did anyone else hear that Columbia is opening a new African American Studies department and will be hiring new faculty to fill it out? I don't know if this is good news or bad news for us African-Americanists (or, in all likelihood, irrelevant to us, since who knows what the timeline is anyway). On the one hand, one would assume more Af-Am work done at the university will mean more opportunities, more faculty to work with, etc., and English and Af-Am departments definitely collaborate. But is this something they will have in mind now (keeping in mind that the new department chair is Farah Griffin, from English)? Will they want to add more Af-Am scholars now so that when new faculty arrives they have some students to work with, or students who can help out with building the new department? Or is it the opposite? That since the university will soon have a significantly higher number of Af-Am specialists, they will want to restrict Af-Am intake in other departments (not sure this makes sense, since Columbia is late to the party and other English departments that coexist with Af-Am departments also have Af-Am scholars, just like they have Americanists despite American Studies programs, etc.)? Or maybe they won't want to add too many Af-Am students now before knowing who they are hiring and what their areas of expertise is?

I mean, most likely this will have no impact since it will take time for the department to be formed and it's a separate department that doesn't necessarily concern itself with literature anyway. Still, hard not to obsess as we wait for news. Any other African-Americanist Columbia applicant got thoughts on this?

January y'all, we're close.

 

[Musmatatus]

@WildeThing I've been trying not to panic and keep my mind off of notifications, but it's reassuring to know that at least one other person is in the same position!

Edited January 2, 2019 by sugilite
Trying to figure out the tagging! Couldn't :(

[Bopie5]

46 minutes ago, WildeThing said:

Why is no one else here? Panicking?

Oh, I am definitely VERY MUCH PANICKING. All I can think about is my apps. Literally the amount of stress dreams I have had is off the charts. I try to banish it from my minds but I still check my email about every hour (even though I know I won't hear back for a few weeks), log into my app portals about once a week (no idea why I do this), and check the GradCafe every hour or two as well, and often end up reading random threads that have little or nothing to do with anything relevant to me. The worst was when I ended up reading through all of the results in the GradCafe results section for all of my schools going many years back...

Also, BIG FRUSTRATION. I'm still in undergrad, I haven't been to any conferences, and the English department at my school doesn't offer any TA positions. But literally in the TWO WEEKS since I've submitted my last app, I've been invited to speak at a conference, had a piece of poetry accepted for publication, AND got a TA essay-grading position in another department. All of this would've strengthened my apps so much ?But it's too late now. Ugh! Guess it helps my CV no matter what, but STILL.

[havemybloodchild]

1 hour ago, WildeThing said:

Also, I have been obsessing over these apps now that we're in 2019, which, in case you didn't realize, is the same year we would be starting our PhDs, should we get accepted. Like, holy shit. In similar Panicville news, it's fucking January 2019. First responses could be out in about two weeks (I've got Emory down as a mid-late January interview notifier). Most if not all the places I've applied were done notifying acceptances by the end of February, which is NEXT MONTH. Why is no one else here? Panicking?

 

Last night I woke up at 1 or 2 in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep for about 4 hours because all I was thinking was that I'm going to get 20 rejections and I'll never get in and I'll never be a professor and I'll just work at a coffee shop or something until I die, bookless, catless, exceedingly grumpy....

The panic is oh so real.

[Musmatatus]

23 minutes ago, Bopie5 said:

But it's too late now. Ugh! Guess it helps my CV no matter what, but STILL.

Congrats on all the good news! I agree that it's a bummer that you weren't notified sooner, but go ahead and update your CV! If you get waitlisted, contacted for an interview, etc., perhaps you could send them an updated CV. I'm not sure what's the proper etiquette on that, but it's worth having something updated regardless. 

[Bopie5]

1 minute ago, sugilite said:

Congrats on all the good news! I agree that it's a bummer that you weren't notified sooner, but go ahead and update your CV! If you get waitlisted, contacted for an interview, etc., perhaps you could send them an updated CV. I'm not sure what's the proper etiquette on that, but it's worth having something updated regardless. 

Thank you thank you! It is all really exciting, and getting some good news in the waiting period is such a morale boost that I honestly shouldn't complain. 

I updated my CV for some fellowships I'm applying to, but I didn't think about maybe sending an updated CV for interview/waitlist...that's a great thought, thank you for the advice!

[WildeThing]

Congrats @Bopie5 for all those good news. I know that's frustrating but those things will always happen because you will always discover something new to add to your SoP or new accomplishments. The brightside: you're always evolving as a scholar! Honestly, with so many things being online now I would welcome a system that allowed you to make as many changes as you want, whenever you want, and the adcomms will see things when they see things. If they printed everything the day after you submitted and you made new changes, too bad. But if they haven't yet, you can still reflect your new ideas. I know why we need hard deadlines (which committees have tended to disregard many a time), but once documents are in but have not been evaluated yet (because who reviews applications over the break or during finals?), I see no harm in allowing for changes. I think some portals allow for it, too.

Y'all, if we're all here panicking we need to posting, so at least it feels like things are happening. Start thinking of things to contribute/say.

For instance, I dunno how many of your are on your second go like me, but for those who aren't, I figure it would help to know exactly what to expect (not that it matters, you'll know when there are changes), so let me tell you what happened to me last year:

I applied to roughly the same number of schools I did this year (so a lot). I got rejected outright everywhere except NYU who offered a partially funded MA I could not afford but was grateful to receive. In pretty much every case barring perhaps one or two that notified everyone at once or within a day, you will hear about interviews and admits first and days or weeks (maybe even a month) later you will hear about rejections. Since all of mine were rejections or partial rejections, that is what I can speak to. In all cases I received an email. Half said to check the portal for a decision notification (which appears out of nowhere, there isn't a box that suddenly changes to CHECK THIS CHECK THIS), the other half stated the decision in the email itself. Some are from DGS, some from Graduate School reps. Most came in February with a few in March, the first was Chicago on February 9th (I applied to Chicago, Brown, Columbia, CUNY, NYU, Michigan, Penn, Virginia, Rutgers, as well as some in Comp Lit and Rhetoric (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA)). Some people talked about seeing changes in the portal before they got an email, and I think that happened to me once, but I ultimately got emails from everyone. The week of February 20th or so was the most active.

As for my half-acceptance. I got an email from a graduate administrator at NYU with two pdfs, one with a letter from the program head notifying me of my rejection/acceptance, and another with registration information. Two days later I got the official offer through an email telling me to check the portal. From this experience my assumption is that if you get a decision notification email it is most likely a rejection, but there have been cases where that was not the case. In all likelihood if several acceptances (beware of dummies and trolls) are posted to the results board and you do not hear from them within a day, it is likely a rejection.

I know no one asked but I also know that last year all I wanted was some sort of info. Like where do I look in the portal to see if I've been accepted (in most cases it will appear above the checklist). Since I'm sure everyone will be refreshing the results page and the portal, let me assure you that, at least in the cases of the universities I mentioned, you WILL receive an email with a decision, no one is forgetting about you, but obviously if you're not accepted it will take longer. Also, the results page, as useful as it is, is also the most demoralizing thing ever. Use with care.

Hope this helps. If anyone wants to know how specific programs notify (rejections) and what they said (mostly generic), let me know and I'll check.

[Bopie5]

@WildeThing Thank you thank you! I totally agree about a system that allows for updates/changes--hopefully that will eventually become the norm? None of my apps allow changes after submissions.

Also agree about posting more/contributing--I've just been hesitant because I don't want to be obnoxious/over post. Although I'm sure many of us are thinking the same thing, so we all just sit here lurking and waiting for someone else to contribute/start a conversation haha!

Thank you for all the info about the notification process. As a first timer, this is so helpful, and at least gives me a small sense of what to expect and when to expect it. 

For you and others who have done this before, do you have any tips on how to healthily process rejections? What helped you persist and try again without being too discouraged? 

 

[havemybloodchild]

13 minutes ago, WildeThing said:

so let me tell you what happened to me last year:

 

In the spirit of mutual panic, here's my story from last year, which was my second go around.  The year prior I applied to an MFA at Uni Glasgow and was accepted, but declined after talking with my professors and getting a better idea of what I wanted my career to look like.

I applied to dual MA/PhD programs at Ohio, Cornell, UW, and Amherst, and an MA at University of Denver.  The first school I heard back from was Ohio, my top choice, which waitlisted me for their PhD program.   That was January 29th.  I was then rejected from Amherst, Cornell, and finally UW.  The last I heard back from was Denver, an email to check the portal, which told me I'd been accepted to the MA program with 50% tuition remission.  I considered the offer but ultimately turned it down.  Although I had specifically stated in my SoP that I was looking for GTA/RA opportunities (I found Denver's website kind of vague about whether this was an option), I learned in a phone conversation with the director of the program that this wasn't possible for MA students.  With that all my eggs were in the Ohio waitlist basket (more of a wet old envelope, really).  I contacted them in the end of March for an update and they'd only had one student accept their offer and one decline, so there was really very little movement.  Eventually I heard from them on April 17th I think, saying I hadn't been accepted.

All of my decisions were communicated through the portal, not in the email from the school telling me a change in my status had been made.

I was really naive last go around, I didn't do nearly as much research as I should have done and I didn't understand the process nearly as well.  It made the process more pleasant, but hopefully less successful than this year will be.

 

[havemybloodchild]

11 minutes ago, Bopie5 said:

do you have any tips on how to healthily process rejections? What helped you persist and try again without being too discouraged? 

 

My professors helped.  They were all wonderful, so I knew my applications were the best effort I was capable of, after all their assistance with my materials.  Also, they were shocked on my behalf, and said some very sharp things about departments which rejected me, and that took care of some of the initial sting.  Just knowing they cared and believed I deserved to get in was very helpful.  

They also went through my materials with a fine tooth comb yet again after I'd heard back and helped strategize changes for this go around.  Having people you respect in your court and a plan for how to persevere is the best way to process, in my opinion.

[WildeThing]

42 minutes ago, Bopie5 said:

@WildeThing

For you and others who have done this before, do you have any tips on how to healthily process rejections? What helped you persist and try again without being too discouraged? 

 

No worries, this is a community and we should make it a healthy and supportive one, even if that sometimes mean enabling obsessive behavior. We're not here to cure anyone, after all.

So, I'll be honest, rejections are rough, especially when you get as many I did. Because it's so easy to obsess and overthink everything, any news makes you go into hyperdrive, so when your schools start notifying and you don't get hit, you analyze everything. Unless you're really lucky AND your applications were amazing AND you somehow figured out perfect fit and ONLY applied to perfect fit schools, you will get rejected by someone. I'd suggest expecting it. I was hopeful that at least one would fall ("come on, more than 15 schools? surely I'm among the the top 100-150 applicants out there") and none did, and that sucks. In my case, the process of hearing from everyone was so long, and the implied rejections were so many, that by the time it all ended I had already resigned myself to striking out. In that sense, having many can be helpful since you still have hope when the first body hits land but by the time the last ones come you already know you're losing. You will ALWAYS have that glimmer of hope that even if the school only takes 2 people and they have already sent out 10 confirmed acceptances last month, when you open that notification you will see "congratulations!". So don't fight it, but don't lean into it. Don't start looking for apartments or daydreaming about courses if you can avoid it.

Try to keep yourself busy. The days will go by faster and you will obsess less. If it all goes to hell, give yourself some time to not think about it (I'm big on repression, my advice might not be long-term healthy). Once some time has passed, if you want to go through this again (up to you, but don't flagellate yourself), then you need to take a good hard look at yourself and ask: a. if I apply again next year, how or why will I be a better candidate? What will I have added to my profile between one deadline and the next? And b. what did I do wrong and what can I change? Answering A is easier than B, since even inertia will usually make you a better candidate, since you add some sort of experience along the way. B will make you go crazy because there's no way to know. Was it the sample? SoP? Grades? GRE? Were you perfect but there was just enough other perfect people in your field? I think any smart candidate can figure out what things were dubious though, even if they're not necessarily what got you rejected. So set up a plan. Figure out what stays the same and what doesn't. Are you retaking GREs? Are you gonna use the same WS, or the same idea for your proposal? Are you gonna try the same schools, other schools? Same schools but different project or approach? When I was talking to an advisor about this cycle, they asked me what I think went wrong and I told them what I thought and they agreed. Point is, you know yourself, you know what proposals were a stretch, what parts of your WS are weak, etc. Don't try to address these things immediately, but in time, as you inevitable wonder what went wrong, you'll figure out. I'll let you know if I was right in 2 months.

Finally, something that helped me reapply as a better candidate, and maybe helped deal with rejection, was applying for and receiving an IRT grant. The IRT deadline is in March, I hadn't even heard back from everywhere when I applied but I figured I'd try and think about it later. I wound up getting accepted so that pushed me to try again, since it made the cost less prohibitive and increased my odds. Without IRT I might not have applied again, or certainly not to as many schools. That said, if I strike out again, I'm out unless some program makes some changes and makes my fit amazing.

I really can't recommend the IRT enough, btw. They look for students who intend on becoming educators and emphasize minorities and underprivileged groups. If you're accepted as an associate, like I was (they have an intensive summer program, too), they will cover your fees to 10-12 schools within their 41-school consortium (every school in my list is a consortium school except CUNY). They will assign you an advisor who will assist you through the process of selecting schools and another who will assist with writing your SoP. That's a lot of help. I will say that I think a lot of it is common sense in that they make you evaluate your own work, but sometimes you need fresh eyes and someone with perspective to guide you. So if you're interested, check here, the deadline is March 1st: https://www.andover.edu/about/outreach/irt/irt-application

EDIT: I forgot to add some important stats about IRT. Of everyone who received IRT support in the past two years (before my cohort), 96% got at least 1 offer with some funding. 66% got at least 3, and 33% got 6 or more. Admittedly, partial funding offers probably aren't what you're looking for so there might be some info missing in the data to get a real picture for fully-funded PhDs, but hey, it's something. Especially if you come from no-name schools like me.

RE-EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to say that I heard about the IRT through Gradcafe, when I was ready to give up. So hopefully the cycle continues (but the real hope is that everyone gets in).

Edited January 2, 2019 by WildeThing
Always be selling.

[WildeThing]

7 minutes ago, kendalldinniene said:

My professors helped.  They were all wonderful, so I knew my applications were the best effort I was capable of, after all their assistance with my materials.  Also, they were shocked on my behalf, and said some very sharp things about departments which rejected me, and that took care of some of the initial sting.  Just knowing they cared and believed I deserved to get in was very helpful.  

They also went through my materials with a fine tooth comb yet again after I'd heard back and helped strategize changes for this go around.  Having people you respect in your court and a plan for how to persevere is the best way to process, in my opinion.

I agree with this, that if you can get input from others that is great. But if you don't, you're not lost, and sometimes other people don't know any more than you do. Last cycle I asked for advice from EVERYONE. I ultimately got a lot of great advice, but also a lot of conflicting advice.