Older students in competitive (funded) PhD lit programs?

[April_Green]

Here's a question for those of you already in competitive (all students fully funded) PhD lit programs, especially on the East Coast: Do your programs seem to admit any 35+ year olds? I'm hoping to apply for Fall '15, and am wondering if my age might count against me (supposing my application materials were otherwise strong). I have a recent MA, a good sense of research interests and intended dissertation topic, a professional outlook, and a settled personal life. I'd be in my early 40's by the time I finished, though; would adcoms see the age factor as a potential strike against me when I went on the job market? Might it dissuade them from taking a gamble on me? I've always looked a few years younger than my actual age, but that doesn't show on paper.

[purpleperson]

I think most places have people of all ages in PhD programs.  I think they view older people as a good balance for the inexperience of the younger people.  

[NowMoreSerious]

I don't believe it will. I got accepted to several places as a 34 year old. I tried to use the time I spent working and doing other things as a positive (On my SOP) rather than negative.

[egwynn]

I'm on the east coast in a fully-funded program, and I only know of one person at any level in the program that started when they were over 35.  There are, in fact, several people who started my direct-entry PhD program when they were 20-21.  The place where I did my MA seemed to admit people in their 20s pretty exclusively, and the same goes for this program.  I don't really know how common that is, but both graduate schools I've attended seem more inclined to admit 20-somethings in all of their humanities departments (I have also never met anyone from Comp Lit, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, French Studies, Communication Studies, and so on who didn't start while in their 20s).  There's always the chance that other cohorts at my current institution have older students in them whom I have not met.  And I guess I would also qualify all of this by saying that, for the most part, I am guessing age based on appearance.  I don't usually go around asking people how old they are.

 

You might want to go look at student profile pages for each program if you're worried about having a broader age-range in your cohort/program.  I can't imagine that they post ages, but many of them have photos.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Lons

[jrockford27]

While it's not quite where you're at, there are people in my incoming cohort who are 33 or 32.  I know that when I was an undergrad we had a PhD student in the department who was in his 40s.  Naturally, people under 35 are going to be better represented because it's not all that common to start a PhD in your late 30s.  I wouldn't take the current age demographics in a department to be a statement on whether they'll admit an older student.  I think it will have much more to do with the fact that there are just simply more applicants in younger age ranges.

[Datatape]

My cohort ranges in age from 25 to early 50s and about a third are on the north side of 35.  I don't think your age is an automatic disqualification at all.

[April_Green]

Thanks, all, for the insights! I aim to prep for my grad apps with a healthy balance of hope and shrewdness--and with a mimimum amount of wishful thinking. It is heartening to hear that there is a broad-ish range of grad ages in some competitive programs, although I'm not surprised to hear that most likely skew younger.

 

NowMoreSerious, this is awesome advice: "I tried to use the time I spent working and doing other things as a positive (On my SOP) rather than negative." Like you, I view my maturity and non-academic professional experiences as strengthening my candidacy for academe rather than otherwise. It sounds like a savvy move to communicate that outlook in my SOP.

 

Lons: I hadn't yet thought to check out profiles of current grad students in my target programs. Thanks for the tip!

[hashslinger]

I think some of the very tip-top programs are biased against older applicants. Like, my impression is that the Ivies don't have a lot of older folks in their ranks. But there are enough solid programs out there who DO accept "older" people--I'm at a pretty good program, and when I entered we had a few people who were older than 30 (including me).

 

To be honest, no one in academia cared about the professional life I'd built outside of school. Like, no one cared that I used my skills to be rather successful. That drove me crazy the first time I applied, but it's to be expected. Most people in academia don't care about the professional non-academic world because they've never been a part of it. They want to work with students who show the most potential in their WS and SoP. 

 

I think the biggest obstacle that older applicants face is that they've maybe been out of school a while, and therefore their writing samples and statements don't talk about the edgiest stuff. So it's tough to know whether there's real ageism going on.

[April_Green]

Hashlinger: Thanks for chiming in! Great feedback here---

I think some of the very tip-top programs are biased against older applicants. Like, my impression is that the Ivies don't have a lot of older folks in their ranks. But there are enough solid programs out there who DO accept "older" people--I'm at a pretty good program, and when I entered we had a few people who were older than 30 (including me).

 

To be honest, no one in academia cared about the professional life I'd built outside of school. Like, no one cared that I used my skills to be rather successful. That drove me crazy the first time I applied, but it's to be expected. Most people in academia don't care about the professional non-academic world because they've never been a part of it. They want to work with students who show the most potential in their WS and SoP. 

 

I think the biggest obstacle that older applicants face is that they've maybe been out of school a while, and therefore their writing samples and statements don't talk about the edgiest stuff. So it's tough to know whether there's real ageism going on.

So, it sounds like you might have gone through a few application seasons (or MA and then PhD apps)... As a returning student, what do you think most helped you land a good spot? It makes sense that there'd be even more pressure on us older applicants to produce a super-savvy SOP and WS. I just finished my MA, but I know I need to use the next year to deepen my knowledge of the current lit-crit scenes relevant to my research interests, and build that awareness into some killer app docs.

Any suggestions for how to bone up on current work? Besides reading the past several years of journals in the areas that interest me, I'm planning to wade through some full-length studies that excite me (newer and classic ones I never got to), browse the paper abstracts for key conferences from the past few years, and mock up a profile of each of the POIs at my target schools with a list of their publications and research interests and recent course descriptions (I go nuts with lists and charts sometimes, but it helps). Any other thoughts? Anyone else, feel free to jump in too!

[Aubergine]

For what it's worth, I know several PhD students in top tier humanities programs in the Ivies who started their PhDs at or around the age of 40. They all had careers as critics, art educators, and/or artists before applying to grad school.

[smellybug]

Also for what it's worth: I was told in the interview process that my non-traditional status was a plus. At 31 I'm the oldest in my cohort, but not by much.