Questions for anyone who is currently in, or has been admitted to the PhD English program at UT Austin

[youarethemoon]

Hi all,

Just wondering about the application experience for those of you who have applied and been admitted to UT Austin. To those who have been rejected, I'd love to hear your comments as well. Just looking to round out a conversation on what UTA is looking for, what the process was like, etc. What were your undergrad grades like? Grad school grades? Test scores? LORs/writing sample/SoP?

[rainy_day]

You probably won't get lots of responses to this question. The thing about these applications is, even if you get in, no one knows "what they were/are looking for." For anyone who could post their great gpa and gre score who was accepted to UTAustin, someone else can post about the time they failed soph yr of college and got in. It's all arbitrary as hell. Any school has a top 20% of applicants that are all about the same in strength and quality, but most accept about 5%.

So what do you do with that? The best you can. Research UTAustin and write a strong fit portion of your sop, a strong sop in general (have ppl read it!), and go over that writing sample like a mo'fo.

And then hit submit and wait for the inevitably (somewhat arbitrary) decision that comes down.

Good luck.

[Venti White Choc. Mocha]

Cross reference the schools metrics on the internet and look at the department site very closely. They usually tell you some of these things somewhere in a FAQ or on the applications material page itself.

[HunkyDory]

My buddy's girlfriend is at UT-Austin doing an English PhD at the moment. Only score I know she got is 650 on the Subject Test, and they thought that was exceptionally strong. She said it's all in the SoP and the Writing Sample.