Fit-ness

[AhabsAdmissionLetter]

Over the last few months as I have read posts here, I have become concerned with how many of us have struggled with the notion of fit and whether or not it is, essentially, meaningless. It is distressing to read that many of you have been rejected from programs where you would be a perfect fit. What does fit-ness mean under such a scenario?

All things marginally equal (good GPA, good scores, good letters of rec), if fit is the sufficient quality to obtain an offer, then what is the operative utility of fit in a system that alters it after the fact of initial consideration?

If I say in my statement of purpose that I would like to investigate Little Dorrit and Bentham, but then take a seminar on African American Literature and have a spark of inspiration greater than my original one and wish to pursue it, on say, Clotel and Cixous, but then my dissertation committee changes it to Slave Narratives and Hypocrisy, and even adds a chapter on Hegelian dialects, what function did my original statement of purpose serve? A bribe to the gatekeeper?

I have two friends who are in a Ph.D. program at a top 5 school who have told me that what they said in their personal statements became irrelevant after two years of research and exposure to theories and texts previously unstudied. And, on top of it all, their dissertation committees significantly changed the focus of their studies.

If fit is about the potential to recycle ideas of people you study under, then what is the point of emphasizing originality? If original research is conducted in solitude, then what good is fit with people who will only read your dissertation once, if only pages of it?

I think fit needs to be reimagined under broader categories; otherwise, it prompts people to lie on their statement of purpose. “Oh, yeah, I love Transcendentalism and theory. Theory transcendentalism theory. Scholar’s name, Institution’s name.” Especially if you’ve had nothing but rejections the first year, why not try misrepresenting yourself the second year?

I’m just not convinced that fit-ness means anything significant if what you wish to study can be self-altered and externally-modified. I do not disagree with polishing ideas while working with experts, but words on a piece of paper could never capture fit if there is no such thing beyond the moment of consideration.

[Imogene]

I think that your argument is valid but futile -- I think that the truth is probably that we and *they* know that the 'fit-ness' aspect of the application is both the most important and most murky part of the selection process. I think you're right that, in the end, the research focus and stated approach and fit in an SOP won't ever actually materialize in practice due to many factors. But I also think that it is the proverbial hoop that you have to jump through to demonstrate that you're capable of identifying and articulating an original idea, demonstrating where it fits in with (and is distinct from) the prevailing scholarship/discourse, and drawing a line between this idea (and your particular approach to it) and the department's faculty and style. It's true that a person could manipulate the details of parts of this equation to exaggerate a fit that may not be so strong, but I think that adcomms know this, and, really, if you can be nimble with your scholarly approach and interests to the degree that you still present valid and intriguing ideas (even if they aren't your priorities), then that still suggests you 'have what it takes to succeed.'

So, the short of it is, yes, 'fit' doesn't really hold significance in terms of your long-term research goals, but probably still is an important indicator of scholarly savvy and potential.

But, of course, lots of admitted folks don't succeed, and those who get waitlisted and rejected 2-3 times before getting in can go on to have amazing 'success.'

Do I wish there were a better process? You bet. Like, why can't I just put my ideas, goals, transcripts, and scores out there and say Hey, here I am; who wants me? Or what if programs put out details of what they're looking for each year (because it seems to change every year based on lots of program variables)? I feel like it's so crazy that we have to do all this guess work and navigate a crapshoot, imagining some crazy wizards behind the curtains of each program deciding our fates.

But I know it's the (dumb, infuriating, soul-violent . . .) game we all have to play.

[desaparecido]

My thoughts on your concern regarding the SOP and shifting interests: In my opinion, at least, what the adcom is looking for, even if you decide to change your focus, is someone that can write convincingly for 2-3 pages about a project they're very much interested in, at least at the time. Saying "I'm interested in writing about Little Dorrit and Bentham" is one thing (in the eyes of the adcom), but writing a really interesting 2.5 page proposal of a project that interjects in the current scholarship about LD and can interestingly explain how your project adds to the conversation in the field, and how such-and-such university's faculty and/or resources would benefit your work immensely - that's another thing completely, and I think that's what adcoms look for in terms of "fit."

The ability to write a really strong proposal like that, I think, is perhaps the most important thing in applying to a PhD program, at least in my experience. Strong GRE scores are cool, a good GPA certainly adds to the package, but the numbers mean relatively little if, in 2-3 pages, an applicant can't explain how his/her project benefits or adds to the conversation going on in his/her proposed field of interest. The best way to help with that sort of thing, in my experience, is applying to and attending as many conferences as you can. For those, you're writing a (generally) 250-500 word proposal of a paper - granted, a paper 20x shorter than your dissertation will be, but the exercise is the same. I got shut out last year, and in the year off I applied to and presented at 20something conferences (excessive? maybe. but I genuinely feel it helped me not only become a fairly solid proposal writing [necessary for publication possiblities, grants, etc. once we're in the profession] but also helped both refine and expand my interests), but also made my CV look much nicer than it did (my CV was pretty much empty the first time I applied... no conferences, no publications, nothing outside of the few courses I TA'd while doing my MA), and makes you look like an active member of the academic community (which, I think, counts, at least sometimes).

This, of course, is far from an exact science. I haven't gotten accepted to lots of schools I was hoping to get into, but I also got into a couple of programs I'm really, really excited about. At the time I applied this go-round, I had presented at I think 24 or 25 conferences in the last year (some of them I turned into road trips and hit 3-4 different conferences over the course of two weeks, presenting different papers at each one, which isn't a bad cognitive exercise!) and, at one conference I went to recently, met a third-year PhD student at Duke who was presenting at his very first conference - so apparently he was able to convince Duke that he had a project worth investing $100,000 into without the (what I see as great) benefit of conference presenting/proposal writing experience. That's just what I feel worked for me, and I genuinely don't think I'd have gotten in anywhere this go-round if I hadn't spent the several months prior to applying writing proposals constantly, sending them out, presenting my work (including, at times, my writing sample and things that I spoke about in my SOP, in various incarnations) and getting feedback from others in the field.

So yeah, even if you decide after writing your SOP that you want to shift focuses (as long as there's still someone at the school you're applying to that you can work with in terms of your new interests), I think the adcom is mostly concerned with an applicant's ability to write a strong enough proposal that can clearly articulate what intellectual conversation you're hoping to insert yourself into, and what your proposed project would add to the existing scholarship.

I hope some of that is at least somewhat helpful!

[AhabsAdmissionLetter]

Imogene, thank you for helping to ground the ideas back to reality. My idealism often neglects attention to such details. I echo your thoughts about there being a better system. I agree that if schools were to post unique opportunities like job descriptions, applying for them would be easier for many of us. Statements such as “School X is looking for 3 theory students, 3 Victorians, and 3 Postmodernists” would certainly be enough to dissuade someone from spending almost $100 in application fees.

Readwritenap, thank you for detailing this from another perspective. I appreciate it and your willingness to share details from your experiences. It certainly does help to hear what you (as someone else) have been doing. Although, I must say that your conference efforts are both inspiring and exhausting to think about! (but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes).

[ComeBackZinc]

I have two friends who are in a Ph.D. program at a top 5 school who have told me that what they said in their personal statements became irrelevant after two years of research and exposure to theories and texts previously unstudied. And, on top of it all, their dissertation committees significantly changed the focus of their studies.

Far sooner than that! The very first thing you hear in most any program is that you don't know what you want or what you're going to study yet. I would echo Imogene: the point is not that you know what you are going to end up researching. The point is that you can demonstrate that you understand what an academic project details. A lot of it is weeding out people who write about how much they love literature, or those who define a completely amorphous subject area, or whose interests are completely out of fashion. A lot of this is signalling: are you an academic? Can you speak and interact like an academic?

The general statement "fit is very important" seems right to me, from my outsider's perspective. But I'm not sure that it always means much. Sure, fit is important. But it's fit purely from the standpoint of the people in the departments, not fit as defined by the applicants. Departments build cohorts based on how they perceive their own needs and the needs of their faculty. There's nothing nefarious there; all institutions advance the interests of their members. But when someone looks at a school from the outside and says "I was a perfect fit there, I should have gotten in," he or she is mistaking student fit for department fit. We can (and do) guess and approximate and assume about what's going inside departments, but it's always gonna be somewhat inscrutable. Which is why I always tell people to let go of any conception they have of this process as "fair," before they start. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

[pelevinfan]

Far sooner than that! The very first thing you hear in most any program is that you don't know what you want or what you're going to study yet. I would echo Imogene: the point is not that you know what you are going to end up researching. The point is that you can demonstrate that you understand what an academic project details. A lot of it is weeding out people who write about how much they love literature, or those who define a completely amorphous subject area, or whose interests are completely out of fashion. A lot of this is signalling: are you an academic? Can you speak and interact like an academic?

The general statement "fit is very important" seems right to me, from my outsider's perspective. But I'm not sure that it always means much. Sure, fit is important. But it's fit purely from the standpoint of the people in the departments, not fit as defined by the applicants. Departments build cohorts based on how they perceive their own needs and the needs of their faculty. There's nothing nefarious there; all institutions advance the interests of their members. But when someone looks at a school from the outside and says "I was a perfect fit there, I should have gotten in," he or she is mistaking student fit for department fit. We can (and do) guess and approximate and assume about what's going inside departments, but it's always gonna be somewhat inscrutable. Which is why I always tell people to let go of any conception they have of this process as "fair," before they start. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

This. Definitely this. Though ComeBackZinc would probably know far better than I would, as he (she? I'm fairly certain that you're a 'he', but not positive) is already in a program, I was told specifically by multiple professors in the department I'll be entering next year that they chose students to fit their vision for the direction that the department is headed in. Specifically, they are starting a bunch of new (really cool, actually) interdisciplinary initiatives, and so they picked a cohort full of people with interdisciplinary interests. Further, they picked both applicants who explicitly detailed interdisciplinary research interests, as well as candidates like myself, with latent interdisciplinary research questions that the adcom could see, but which I didn't specifically articulate in my SoP. I would imagine that specific goals for a program's new cohort will vary widely from school and school, and also from year to year. So the 'perfect fit' is really more in the eyes of the faculty, and not of the applicant.

[Stately Plump]

The ability to write a really strong proposal like that, I think, is perhaps the most important thing in applying to a PhD program, at least in my experience.

I agree. I think schools want to see (a) that you can think through a research project and ( that you have done some hw about the program to which you are applying and have been able to see how your interests might fit in with them.

It sucks that it ends up coming down to this type of stuff The fact is that, probably, almost all of us are overly qualified to be in grad school and that we will do incredibly well there.

[crystalleem]

It sucks that it ends up coming down to this type of stuff The fact is that, probably, almost all of us are overly qualified to be in grad school and that we will do incredibly well there.

THIS!!!!

[anxious_aspirant]

Again, my frustration comes from the fact that 2.5 pages must magically:

1) Defend/explain one's background (at least for me, as a former visual arts student)

2) Tailor statement to the school's focuses/faculty/courses

3) Actually propose something halfway decent, which to me also means showing that I have very specific texts and theoretical underpinnings in mind (considering the background thing again)

4) Adequately connect to other pieces of the application, WS, etc.

5) Ultimately distinguish you from most other applicants.

And I'm plagued with chronic verbosity. My newest iteration, anticipating next year's cycle is already 2.5, single spaced, sans school tailoring. The "fit" thing is even more elusive for me because the schools from which I've heard the most positive feedback expressed interest in my pretty atypical proposal, and my research about the programs didn't really show that they were more inclined toward the interdisciplinary than others. Conversely, schools whose sites, course offerings, and faculty touted cross-disciplinary research were outright rejections. What gives?

The most nebulous advice I received about the SoP was that I should write a statement that makes your application figuratively "float up" in the pile rather than "sink down." This from my former professor / undergrad dept. chair. The sticking point being that such a task requires a good understanding of what most other SoP's look like (fairly impossible).

[ComeBackZinc]

The only advice I can give, and I know it's inadequate, is to look at other SOPs-- those that people are working on and are asking to have reviewed, and those that have been used successfully in the past-- and have yours looked at by whoever is willing. That doesn't seem to happen much here, but it's very common over at the Livejournal grad community. It can be a slog, particularly because these are such individual, specific documents (applicant and program), but I think after a lot of exposure you do start to get a sense of the rhythms and conventions of the form.

[Fiona Thunderpaws]

It sucks that it ends up coming down to this type of stuff The fact is that, probably, almost all of us are overly qualified to be in grad school and that we will do incredibly well there.

I also agree with this. After lurking on these boards for a few months, I can honestly say that I've never encountered a group as talented and driven as the Lit/Comp/Rhet people here. It seems unfair that some people make it in and others don't, sometimes for no really apparent reason. But we all already knew fairness doesn't have a place in the application game.

That being said, I 100% agree with AhabsAdmissionLetter that schools could do a few things that could prevent this process from the massive waste of money and resources it can be for us. If I knew school X wasn't looking for anymore Gender and Sexuality people, and school Y doesn't like accepting people without a MA, I wouldn't apply to either. My mentors advised me to look at applying to grad school as applying for a job, and anyone hiring is looking for some specific traits in their applicants.

I understand departments don't always know exactly what they're looking for in applicants-- but even just a little information like this could go a long way in making the process easier for everyone involved.

[Stately Plump]

And I'm plagued with chronic verbosity. My newest iteration, anticipating next year's cycle is already 2.5, single spaced, sans school tailoring. The "fit" thing is even more elusive for me because the schools from which I've heard the most positive feedback expressed interest in my pretty atypical proposal, and my research about the programs didn't really show that they were more inclined toward the interdisciplinary than others. Conversely, schools whose sites, course offerings, and faculty touted cross-disciplinary research were outright rejections. What gives?

I think part of the challenge, and part of what schools are looking for, is a clarity and conciseness that allows you to say everything you need to say in 1000 words, or just about 2 single space pages (or less, for some schools).

The best advice I received was to show, not tell. I had a sentence in my SOP about traveling to London and seeing manuscripts from Philip Sidney, so I talked about that as an inspiration for my current research interests in manuscript/archival studies.

A lot of us have probably done similar things, and unfortunately there's no secret to success. But I do think that most schools are thinking clarity of thought translates to clarity of prose, which they are thinking will come out by asking someone to write so much in so few words.

Hope this helps

[ComeBackZinc]

Certainly, not one word about how much you love literature or academics or being a student, gah. And no telling them their business; if you have any language like "Author X, one of the greatest novelists in the history of Burkina Faso," you are wasting space and possibly patience. They know how prominent and important the authors you want to study are.

[spasticlitotes]

I echo your thoughts about there being a better system. I agree that if schools were to post unique opportunities like job descriptions, applying for them would be easier for many of us. Statements such as “School X is looking for 3 theory students, 3 Victorians, and 3 Postmodernists” would certainly be enough to dissuade someone from spending almost $100 in application fees.

That being said, I 100% agree with AhabsAdmissionLetter that schools could do a few things that could prevent this process from the massive waste of money and resources it can be for us. If I knew school X wasn't looking for anymore Gender and Sexuality people, and school Y doesn't like accepting people without a MA, I wouldn't apply to either.

Hundreds. And thousands. Of dollars. And all for what? All of you people are friggin amazing. And this system is seriously flawed. Maybe we should come up with a group proposal for adcoms. I like Ahab's idea, for starters...

[Stately Plump]

Statements such as “School X is looking for 3 theory students, 3 Victorians, and 3 Postmodernists” would certainly be enough to dissuade someone from spending almost $100 in application fees.

I agree that this would have been enormously helpful, and I probably would not have applied places if I knew they weren't looking for what I was bringing.

However, I doubt if very many schools START the application review process with this type of forward-thinking. They are probably leery of soliciting students in a particular field at the expense of other, potentially great students. They probably don't want to say, "Okay, we want three Postmodernists and will not consider and early modernist." I think they probably start the review process more holistically, and once they see what they have to work with, they begin to narrow it down.

I think where the numbers for the individual sub-fields begins to play in is when the school has 30-40 students they really want, and from there they try to begin to narrow it down.

[vordhosbntwin]

well, two of the schools i applied to (cornell and brown), when i asked them for feedback upon receipt of rejection, talked specifically about fit. in fact, here is what cornell had to say:

I wish I had time to write a substantive response. In brief, I would say that you are extremely well-qualified and your application was very strong. We are a very small program--we admit only 3 students per year. Prof. Buck-Morss is no longer here and Prof. Hohendahl has retired--this may have contributed to our decision in part. In part, I would say that we have admitted students in areas of research that fit better with our current strengths. I am certain that you will do very well and I wish you all of the best in your graduate studies. With regret, Karen Pinkus

brown said something similar, that my interests weren't consistent with current faculty foci. if a program gets 100 applicants, i bet many of them have the skills necessary for success in the program, but only so many are going to have interests that accord with those of the faculty. i dunno, i have a good friend who went to yale english to do renaissance stuff, but ended up totally reinventing himself and becoming an american modernism scholar. but here's the thing, if you do reinvent yourself, you're only going to reinvent yourself as something that would make sense in your current environment. if, as the initial poster wrote, you were to become interested in african american literature or w/e, chances are, it's because your program has someone whose expertise is african american literature.

thus i think fit is important. you have to demonstrate to the program that you already have a strong project in mind, but if that changes because you decide that you like something else going on in the program better, well, you are still demonstrating a "fit" with the department. my friend may have wanted to do renaissance lit, but his interests changed because of the faculty itself, and thus his fit remained more or less intact.

excuse all typos and shitty syntax

and i dunno, i would be wary of presenting at 24-25 conferences. i've a senior undergrad, and i've presented at around 10 over the past two years. a faculty member at yale, one at hopkins, and one of my profs at my current university have all said that it's much better to present at a few highly competitive conferences than many less competitive conferences. i mean, very few people write 20-25 quality papers in a year. most phd programs expect you to write 2-3 per semester (and harvard, for instance, on the comp lit website, says that they prefer you do 2!). in fact, over-presenting or over-publishing will make you look desperate, and will actually overshadow the more competitive or the higher quality conferences you've listed on your cv. it's better, on my view, to publish one or two quality articles in one or two renowned journals than 20 articles in 20 mediocre journals.

just my two cents.

Edited March 4, 2012 by vordhosbntwin

[DorindaAfterThyrsis]

I echo a lot of what people here have said, especially those that have pointed out that fit is NOT an arbitrary/alchemical category, but is actually a qualification made by real, living people (professors), and not some mechanical beast called "The AdComm". The people determining "fit" are scholars and human beings with real interests and real agendas in terms of who they want to be working with for the next six years. While the specific minutiae of "research interests" outlined in an SOP might not correspond directly with a current faculty member's work, and will certainly transform and morph over the course of the program, what the faculty reading applications are actually looking at is a student's approach to literature, and their approach to research. How do you frame problems? What types of problems are interesting to you? The way a prospective student poses questions is, I think, much more important than the specific questions they pose, and is certainly more important than name-dropping and "proving" ones learnedness.

These are, obviously, not the types of things that can be addressed by the sort of "job posting" type of approach that is being proposed here. Even if such an endeavor were undertaken by schools, the problem of "fit" within a given category would still apply.

Long story short: the fact that one's interests are bound to change during the course of a program does not in any way invalidate the importance of intellectual "fit". It is our job as applicants to ensure that the materials we submit (SOP and WS being the ones we have control over) demonstrate not simply our ability to sychophantically name-drop trendy theorists and professors, but our ability to frame compelling problems (in the SOP) and (in the WS) to tackle those problems in a productive, nuanced, and interesting way. There's a reason that these are the materials that make up an application. Professors of English are, by nature, excellent close readers. Our job is to provide application materials that stand up to rigorous close reading. That is, in my mind at least, a pretty adequate way of assessing one's suitability for a particular program.

The (seemingly popular) notion that the application process is some sort of code that needs to be cracked is troubling: would you really want to spend six years studying under a group of people who are so easily hoodwinked (or so completely apathetic) that your ability to "jump through hoops" is the thing that gets you in to Grad School? Write good materials, be honest in describing what gets your intellectual juices flowing, and trust that the people reading your materials are also being honest in assessing whether or not you fit into their program. If, after submitting your best and most honest work, they deem that you don't fit, chances are you probably don't. Apply elsewhere until you find where you do fit.

There are no magic bullets here. Sorry.

[Stately Plump]

I echo a lot of what people here have said, especially those that have pointed out that fit is NOT an arbitrary/alchemical category, but is actually a qualification made by real, living people (professors), and not some mechanical beast called "The AdComm". The people determining "fit" are scholars and human beings with real interests and real agendas in terms of who they want to be working with for the next six years.

I agree; I think adcomms use "fit" to try to describe the process of selecting 12 students from a pool of 40 that they would really like to take. Because ultimately, that is probably what happens; they end up with a bunch of students they would love to take, and they have to select a fraction of those students. "Fit" is the word they throw out there to justify their decisions, though that word probably doesn't mean much; when you are deciding between two equally well-prepared students who are both obviously capable of succeeding in X program, how do you determine which one to take? Well, I dunno, this one seems to "fit" better with what we have going on here. Why? I'm not precisely sure, but she wants to work with Y professor, she's from a different type of school than some of our other applicants, her potential research interests have less (or more) overlap with some of our other current students, she's from out of state, etc. etc. When describing why they chose that student, "fit" is the word that sums up all of those things.

I'm just trying to think like an adcomm. I don't actually know any of this for sure, but based on some conversations with current profs, this is kinda what I gather.

What I'm trying to say is, fit sucks

Edited March 4, 2012 by Stately Plump

[AhabsAdmissionLetter]

I’m really grateful for all of your responses; they have been helpful to read. I hope many of you will continue in the discipline with the same collegial and thoughtful approaches to issues like this.

There is a consensus building among some of these posts that fit is faculty/department driven and is measured by how they see an applicant fitting in with it.

There is also an implication that the SOP and writing sample are the ways they measure fit and that since your stated interests in these artifacts can/will change, they are actually looking for form over substance; or, fit is more of a determination of if you can articulate an academic issue compellingly and in a form that they find appealing, within their guidelines of fit. As ComeBackZinc said, signaling.

As others in this post have suggested, fit is something that can become indistinct when too many qualified candidates apply. If 20 could fit and only 10 can, then fit becomes a something halfway between a personality struggle and a who do you throw off the lifeboat thought experiment.

So, if fit is

a. something articulated externally by the adcom or department; and,

b. something determined by measure externally by the adcom; and,

c. something only measured, really at the end, in the comparative among equal, shortlisted applicants; and,

d. measured from stated interests that will change, and in ways of stating that will change.

e. something people who are asked to leave a Ph.D. program have

Then fit is

f. ultimately something used to disqualify applicants who do not approach it but cannot outright qualify candidates who do; and,

g. genuinely useless as a predictive model if the process of training future professionals trains professionals to write better and exposes them to new research and ideas and new ways to research and new ways to convey ideas; and,

h. suspect when many students who have “it” do not evidently have “it.”

I’m just trying to think this through. DorindaAfterThyrsis said that there are no magic bullets and Stately Plump added that fit sucks—I agree. But fit is something or nothing, it can’t be both.

Edited March 4, 2012 by AhabsAdmissionLetter

[vordhosbntwin]

put simply, fit is to some extent your ability to write a proposal sure, but i mean, i really think it's not a very difficult concept: i was rejected from two programs because the professors i identified in my statements were no longer in the program. there could have been other reasons, but every school i have been accepted to did so because specific faculty members could do work with me. ability to write well and to articulate your interests is a prerequisite - i don't think i would bother applying if i couldn't do those things. i'm most interested in the relationship between modernism and 19th and 20th century german philosophy, and lo and behold - the programs i got into specialize in those things. fit isn't some inexplicable metaphysical concept; it's just how well you, uh, fit.

[thestage]

What no one is talking about is time: namely, ascertaining what every professor at every school is interested in, good at, and what they have done lately is a spectacular waste of it.

[vordhosbntwin]

What no one is talking about is time: namely, ascertaining what every professor at every school is interested in, good at, and what they have done lately is a spectacular waste of it.

if you don't have some idea of what some professors are doing at each school you applied to, why would you want to go there?

honestly, i spent maybe an hour looking at each school's website to identify POIs based on what their website blurbs mentioned and what courses they'd recently taught. for those professors i was especially interested in, i read an article or two that each had written, maybe even a book chapter, and for some schools, there were professors i already knew i was interested in. because i applied to 15 schools, that did take a lot of time, but i wouldn't say it was a waste. if i hadn't done so, i would have been hard pressed to give you a good reason as to why i would want to attend that specific program.

[pelevinfan]

if you don't have some idea of what some professors are doing at each school you applied to, why would you want to go there?

honestly, i spent maybe an hour looking at each school's website to identify POIs based on what their website blurbs mentioned and what courses they'd recently taught. for those professors i was especially interested in, i read an article or two that each had written, maybe even a book chapter, and for some schools, there were professors i already knew i was interested in. because i applied to 15 schools, that did take a lot of time, but i wouldn't say it was a waste. if i hadn't done so, i would have been hard pressed to give you a good reason as to why i would want to attend that specific program.

I also don't see how that could possibly be a 'spectacular waste of' time. I don't think you necessarily have to research in-depth every single professor in every single department in which you are vaguely interested, but I personally found it immensely helpful to find two or three professors who work in roughly the same period that I do, see what courses they teach, and what kind of scholarship they have published lately. I ruled out many programs just by seeing that they didn't have professors with whom I wanted to work. I would say it probably saved me a lot of time in the end, by helping me narrow my list and really identify my top choices.

[ComeBackZinc]

What no one is talking about is time: namely, ascertaining what every professor at every school is interested in, good at, and what they have done lately is a spectacular waste of it.

We are lucky to have the bounty of your wisdom, oh sage.

There is, of course, a more pessimistic take on all of this: everyone's opinion is conditioned by his or her success within the system. Those that got into their favored programs have a romantic view. Those that got into some programs but not the ones they wanted most will have a more critical take. Those who don't get in anywhere are likely to have a negative opinion of the whole process.

Dorinda, I don't doubt that close reading is important. And, as I have done consistently, I will support the broad notion that fit is very important. But where your comment misses the mark is in its implication that somehow, you can assure your success through your own close writing. And I just don't think that's true, all for all. Last year my program had a 3% acceptance rate. I'm at the program that I wanted more than any other. I'm happy and successful and fulfilled at school. So I'm the definition of a person who should endorse your version of events, for self-interested reasons. But I just don't think life works that way. I think, instead, that you can take your best swing, position yourself the best way possible, maximize your chances, and hope. The fact of the matter is that you can do everything perfectly in the application process and be rejected. That's just how it is.

I devote most of my days to reading education research on literacy. What I'm struck by, over and over again, is the perfectly arbitrary nature of who succeeds as a literate person, who can read and write at a high level. What the research tells us, over and over again, is that success as a reader and writer has very little to do with you and very much to do with chance. Were you raised by literate parents? What was their education level? How often did they read to you as a child? Were there books in the home? How often were you taken to the library? Those things are vastly more important for your literacy than anything that you yourself control.

So with most of life. When you do get into grad school in English, you read plenty of theorists who explain patiently that the idea of meritocracy is an illusion. But oddly enough, in this space, a profoundly American, regressive idea endures: that your success is mostly the product of your intelligence and your work ethic. It's about as conservative as it gets, and I don't think it's true. The truth is that you've got to accept the fact that this is all a roll of the dice, do your best, and be prepared to move one, when you have to.

But maybe I'm just drunk.

[ComeBackZinc]

That should be amended to "probably I'm just drunk. And on a Sunday, to boot." No offense meant, Dorinda, not at all.