Choosing Your Schools - How did you decide?

[id quid]

Thanks! Someone else had mentioned non-Toronto Canadian schools to me as well, so I'll definitely take a look.

 

I've seen the funded MA's thread. I'll take a look at it again. Probably, I'll painstakingly go through it and see if I can make a case for any of them. The biggest challenge for me with this restriction is to make sure I find a school that will actually support and improve upon my application. That means I need to be very conscious of the faculty and program support for Medieval (and, particularly, Anglo-Saxon and Romano-British). The additional training in languages and the interdisciplinary aspects is what makes Toronto so strong, and so desireable. OF COURSE it would be the one program that carries no funding with it.

 

id est quid est!

[repentwalpurgis]

Someone tell me if I'm wrong, but this helped me out, and maybe it can help others.

 

I looked at recent conferences in my field, at specific papers and who wrote them, and whether their interests fit with mine (better yet if they are from the broad-reaching list of schools that I started with).  Of course, this is introducing a question of whether I should be looking at "fit" at all, but this is quickly helped me to eliminate the schools where I realized there was no one I could work with and that I'd merely been in awe at their merit or hearsay. 

 

Of course, I've moved far away from "I want to go to that school just cuz it's IN THE TOP MILLIONTH WHATEVER".  I'm still looking at schools that are excellent, but making sure I can fit in with who is already there, too.  Methodology, resources (a personal favorite is if the school is a part of the Folger consortium), opportunities for collaborative work (academic graduate journals and the like) are not merely cherries on the proverbial top but slowly becoming logical reasons to attend such-and-such school.

[id quid]

On a related note, my professor told me that the individuals I work with/learn from/who write recommendation letters for the next step are far more important than the name on the degree. I'll note this is a specific caveat for English and Medieval Studies, where a Medieval Studies degree with substantial literature work will be considered equivalent to, or in some cases superior to, a standard English degree.

 

It was a big anxiety of mine, since I am very interested in Medieval Studies, and I would value the extra training in specific areas like paleography or codicology, but I didn't want to "dilute" my chances at an English PhD. On the contrary, it provides me precisely the deep training required to successfully call myself a "medievalist," and also gives me a little more flexibility when joining a PhD program to use that time to broaden my interests and study so as to make myself a more versatile candidate for jobs.

[gatz]

Thought I'd give y'all an update on my meetings:

 

Both professors agree a Master's degree is my best next step. I need to distance myself from my mixed transcript, my transfer, my few years away from school.

 

hey also agree that a British degree is almost definitely not worth it, and in their experience no student comes out of it without significant debt which follows them into their PhD programs (if they're even so lucky as to continue into one). 

 

I'm a little frustrated with the answer to get a Master's degree coupled with the missive to "avoid debt." The number of Master's programs which give me a leg up on my chances to get into, say, Yale or Berkeley or Notre Dame, is limited, and the number of those which are funded is even more limited. A sampling of the schools one professor recommended I add to my list: University of Chicago's MAPH, UVA's MA, Carnegie Mellon's MA,, UToronto's MMS. Now, go ahead and guess how many of those are funded. Once you've got that, check the cost of tuition + living expenses for them. Then compare that to the British degrees.

 

What's the difference? :|

 

Good, fully funded masters degree programs are harder to find than phd programs, no doubt. But for my (different) subfield I found two that I am thrilled about. It took some calling to figure out the funding situation and a lot of browsing the internet, but keep searching! Both of mine are in states I'm not exactly thrilled to live in for two years, but it's worth it for the peace of mind. It also frees me up to only apply to the phd programs that I really really want to go to, because I have a strong suspicion these masters programs would be excited to take me even if I turn out not to be phd material yet.

[id quid]

Funding is a really tricky issue, because there's really no reason for many US programs -- where the emphasis is more on BA to MA/PhD instead of other countries' BA to MA to PhD -- to host a funded Master's program.

 

So far, in programs that seem to have the support, I've found University of Illinois - Urbana-Champagne, University of Connecticut, and University of Tennessee-Knoxville. 

 

More broadly, the other programs recommended to me included University of Chicago's MAPH (!), UVA, and University of Toronto. Toronto was already on my list, and everyone agrees it'll be a huge boost to a medievalist's application to go there. That said? NONE of those programs offer funding, not really. MAPH sometimes waives 50-100% of tuition, but Chicago is a pricey city with a COL around $21k. Taking into account the time of program, the total cost for MAPH's 1 year is over $70k (!!), UVA's 2 years is $96k (!!!), and Toronto's 2 years is also about $70k. Compare that against, say, a gross overestimate of the cost to attend Oxford for 1 year ($50k) or York ($40k). 

 

I'm having a hard time seeing why it makes "more sense" to do Chicago or UVA than Oxford or York. I do definitely see why Tennessee and even Connecticut are a good bet, no question there.

[Katia_chan]

Have you looked at University of Missouri in Columbia?  I don't know if they'd specifically have your exact interests, but I've met some of their medieval faculty, and they're really great.  And for being Missouri, it's a really, really fun city.  A good friend of mine is in the program, and cannot say enough good things about it.

 

Also, their program is MA/PHD, with pretty darn decent funding.  She's been teaching from the beginning, and has had excellent luck collecting further opportunities working for their writing center, editing journals, etc.

 

Another bonus there, if you decided you wanted to do PHD somewhere else, you do have the option of simply leaving after finishing the MA, because you take the exams for it.  So the MA is not just implied.  Obviously I think they prefer you to stay, but you do have freedom there.

 

I believe the woman you'd like to start your search with would be Johanna Kramer.

 

Hope that helps.

[id quid]

Thank you for pointing me that way, but I can't do an MA/PhD on my record. It's strictly MA for this round of apps.

 

I thought I'd point out that one of my professors also recommended the route you suggest -- that is, to go to an MA/PhD school I might have a good chance of getting into (she recommended OSU or UC Davis, I believe) and leave with the Master's. Viable strategy, apparently, and worth considering for someone else who has the option!

[danieleWrites]

It was a process.

 

1. Take stock of myself. What am into? What do I need from the full complement of faculty in a program? What do I need from faculty that would fill the role of advisers, mentors, etc.? What do I want to do with my scholarship? How much help do I need to get through the program? What things must a location offer for my spouse. Use that to make a list of minimum criteria that a school, its program, and its location must meet in order for me to get along there. (This is where I defined fit--based on minimum need, not want.)
2. Read a lot critical articles in the areas I'm interested in and in areas related to my interests, and then compile a list of people to follow up on. I was not looking for a mentor-figure, but for people who were doing exciting scholarship and could handle what I want to do (since this requires a mixture of literature and sociology, I was looking for flexibility in thinking rather than someone working with the same theories or authors). I knew that not everyone on the list would be faculty or faculty involved in a PhD program, but it was my beginning.
3. Find the schools that 1) employed these people and 2) had a PhD program in literature and a minimum of a master's program in sociology so (I need, at minimum, a methodology course). or the schools from which that these people got a PhD (lit and soc requirements, too).
4. Look at school requirements to reject any that I didn't meet (weirdly, enough, none of them despite my less than stellar GPA); and to reject any that did not allow me to take a few courses in sociology.
5. Look over dissertations by recent graduates to see the quality of scholarship coming out of the school. Dissertations are supposed to represent the best work of the student, so if the program is putting out junk, it's not a program I'm into. I didn't expect to find a lot of junk, and didn't. I did reject a few schools because the super-majority of dissertations were lighter on theory than I was comfortable with. And this was only because my interests are theory-heavy, not because the quantity of theory is a measure of quality scholarship. I did not use dissertations to gauge fit in any other way.
6. Stalk faculty! This step is dual purpose. First, to find programs that had enough faculty that were doing things within my interests or related enough to my interests that I would have a range of people to work with. Second, to makes notes to tailor my SOP for each program. While I had (and still have) no idea which people read my application, I did hope that whoever read it would be able to connect my stuff with people in the department.
7. Because I didn't have enough sense to do it during step 6, rank programs in order of the ones I was most interested in/most useful to me.
8. Take list of schools and their locations to my spouse and have him veto the ones that were in locations he absolutely could not do, and asterisk ones that he could live with, but would prefer not to. He vetoed everything in New England except Yale because it was Yale and he'd rather suffer the fires of hell (which is apparently all of Connecticut) than have me give up an opportunity like Yale). I accidentally forgot to apply. Oops. I should note that I decided, in advance, that I would only rejected schools where it was clear that I couldn't get in due to GPA or GRE scores. The big names can't tell me yes if I don't give them the opportunity, right?
9. Re-order the list because it did not occur to me that there would be a list with asterisks when I was doing step 7. First part/top of list list, I ranked the ones my guy was okay with in order of most interested (my preferred four schools were there anyway, which was very cool), to least. Bottom of the list, I ranked the asterisked schools.
10. Found out application costs, including transcript costs. Figure out how many schools I could afford to apply to the first round, and apply to the ones at the top of my list. The list was put aside for next round, in case I didn't get in.

 

After that, it was creating my application packet for each school and spending a lot of money on transcripts. I have credits piled up in several colleges. Ouch. I got into my top choice.

 

College ranking guides played no part in my decision. The collective ability of their graduate students to demonstrate skills at the GRE was not something I found useful.

[repentwalpurgis]

danieleWrites, your post has helped me to realize that I'm on the same track to something similar, but the fact that I have unease in my choices (still) is going to be helped by emulating some of what you've done.  Thank you.