Instead of a "chance me" thread, could we start a thread to discuss aspects of our English apps that can be reasonably strengthened?

[whereareyourcitations]

It's best to get advice from faculty members on this front, but their time is limited, so I thought it might be useful for all of us gearing up for the 2021 cycle, or celebrating/healing from the 2020 cycle to talk about our apps and their weak spots.

Here's a summary, I guess, of my app:

Stats:

GRE: V161 (88th percentile), Q151 (41st percentile), A5.5 (98th percentile)

Undergrad GPA: 3.97 at a public research university

Graduate GPA: 3.96 at a small, unranked rhet/comp program

Teaching experience: worked as a TA (instructor of record) for two years, have adjuncted two junior-level courses, assisted our college's WPA in curriculum design

Publications: a nonfiction essay for a smaller women's journal, and currently working on submitting an eco-critical lit theory piece to some journals 

Conferences: none, I was working full-time and teaching during my degree so I unfortunately left that on the back-burner. I have given several professional developments and spoken at some seminars at two universities, though

Areas of focus: digital rhetoric, ecocriticism, and data mining/text mining as both a literature and a composition tool

SOP: haven't drafted yet, but I plan to focus on how place and environment are inextricable in my understanding of the beauty of language, and that I think empirical methods (data mining, contextual analysis, etc) can be used to carve a path for its beauty to be understood more widely by more disciplines. I'm vying to be a part of a program that encourages interdisciplinary study, not because language/literature/rhetoric needs to be supplemented, but because it needs to be expanded. Only anecdote I plan on discussing is my time as a backpacker and how it inspired my first research project. 

LORs: one from graduate school chair, one from very well-published friend and professor, and one from a linguistics professor I absolutely adore

Based on your own experience, or on advice given from your own mentors, what would you say can and needs to be improved?

 

 

[WildeThing]

It's really impossible to say. All of the things you mention are things you can't really improve, other than maybe retaking the GRE (which many programs are doing away with anyway). You could try for more publications or conferences or teaching experience but all of those have a negligible impact anyway. Get your WS, SOP and LORs as strong as they can be. Get them vetted, write and rewrite them critically. There's nothing much anyone here can say to help you beyond guessing at what sort of things might work for the SOP/WS based on their own experience. With that in mind, the only thing I would say personally is that I think personal life anecdotes don't really fit with what the SOP is meant to do so I would omit that (but I'm sure someone will come along and say that they used anecdotes and were very successful).

[Rrandle101]

I agree with the post above about using personal anecdotes. I think 1,000 words seems like a lot but when you're trying to really hammer home on what you want to do, what you have done, why you want to go to that school, and who you want to work with you may not find room to include it in a meaningful way/the way you're envisioning it in your head. I started my SOP with a statement about Mussolini's appropriation of the Aeneid and connected it to the idea that the study of the transmission of texts from the Classical/medieval world is important in our society today and was told by all of my profs that it was the most powerful part of my SOP. There is a way to bring an anecdote in but it shouldn't be the focal point of what you're talking about or the thing that binds all your really important achievements and accomplishments together. It looks like you're doing all the right things though and pretty much anyone here can tell you about the insane number of times they revised their SOPs and writing samples (I certainly didn't end up with what I thought I would have going in). Best of luck and hope you kill your cycle though!