Should I do an unfunded MA?

[dazedandbemused]

I have like, 40 cents to throw into this conversation, so bear with me.

 

I applied to grad school twice. The first time I applied for fall 2012, I was coming from an undergrad that no one has ever heard of and even though I got a great education, my professors are so outside of the current movement of the field that I wasn't really equipped to make a good application. Out of my twelve apps, I got one waitlist and four consolation MA acceptances, one of which was NYU. I seriously considered accepting them and even visited the department during that spring. I came away from that visit with two major convictions: going that much in debt for an MA was madness and the attention paid to the terminal MAs would probably not be worth my time. When the MA student who was showing me around told me that some people were working two or three jobs to make ends meet, I realized I was in crazy town. If that's not a cash cow, I don't know what is. I'm sure people with less debt than I have might be willing to make it work, but I wasn't down for that.

 

After that, I decided to accept an offer for the MA at Boston College, which offered the chance of maybe being funded in the second year (I later learned that that funding required a lot of work for an unlivable amount of money), but I got lucky and received an offer for a funded post bacc at University of Pittsburgh. Which brings me to my next few cents: if you feel that, for whatever reason, you are underprepared for PhD apps, do an MA or a post-bacc, but I truly believe that funding is an absolute must. I never could have gotten into my program without the classes that I took last year and the copious help that I received from various profs at Pitt. Not having to worry about where I was going to get money from was a huge relief, and I can't begin to express how glad I am that I didn't do either of those MAs.

 

Don't let desperation freak you out, like it almost did for me. That money might not seem like an obstacle now, but when you're thirty or forty or whatever and you're an adjunct (as most of us might be), you're going to be really pissed that you're paying off over $50,000 in loans.

 

Also, if anyone's interested, this is the program I did at Pitt. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone lucky enough to get it offered to them.

[Mr protagonist]

Thanks all of you for some great advice. I more than likely will be rejecting the offer, because I just can't do that to myself -- as disappointed as I am to miss out on such an opportunity. But, I'm sure more doors will open, as they say. 

[Phoebecaulfield]

I have like, 40 cents to throw into this conversation, so bear with me.

 

I applied to grad school twice. The first time I applied for fall 2012, I was coming from an undergrad that no one has ever heard of and even though I got a great education, my professors are so outside of the current movement of the field that I wasn't really equipped to make a good application. Out of my twelve apps, I got one waitlist and four consolation MA acceptances, one of which was NYU. I seriously considered accepting them and even visited the department during that spring. I came away from that visit with two major convictions: going that much in debt for an MA was madness and the attention paid to the terminal MAs would probably not be worth my time. When the MA student who was showing me around told me that some people were working two or three jobs to make ends meet, I realized I was in crazy town. If that's not a cash cow, I don't know what is. I'm sure people with less debt than I have might be willing to make it work, but I wasn't down for that.

 

After that, I decided to accept an offer for the MA at Boston College, which offered the chance of maybe being funded in the second year (I later learned that that funding required a lot of work for an unlivable amount of money), but I got lucky and received an offer for a funded post bacc at University of Pittsburgh. Which brings me to my next few cents: if you feel that, for whatever reason, you are underprepared for PhD apps, do an MA or a post-bacc, but I truly believe that funding is an absolute must. I never could have gotten into my program without the classes that I took last year and the copious help that I received from various profs at Pitt. Not having to worry about where I was going to get money from was a huge relief, and I can't begin to express how glad I am that I didn't do either of those MAs.

 

Don't let desperation freak you out, like it almost did for me. That money might not seem like an obstacle now, but when you're thirty or forty or whatever and you're an adjunct (as most of us might be), you're going to be really pissed that you're paying off over $50,000 in loans.

 

Also, if anyone's interested, this is the program I did at Pitt. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone lucky enough to get it offered to them.

 

 

Thank you so much for that info. I think I'm going to apply to the program you did at Pitt. I love Pittsburgh and have been looking for an excuse to move there for two years now.

[readallthethings]

As many people have already said, ALL of my undergrad professors told me to absolutely NOT go to any English graduate program without full funding. They gave various reasons for this: the academic job market is (as we all are constantly told) quite awful, programs tend not to invest as much in students they don't fund, the debt will likely be impossible to pay back, you won't get the experience of a TAship, working multiple jobs to make ends meet while in the program will make it very very difficult to truly focus on your academic work, etc. 

 

I was in a similar position last year. I applied for PhD programs and either got rejected, wait-listed (and ultimately rejected), or accepted into partially/unfunded MA programs. Of these MA programs, a couple of them would have looked really good on paper, but I could NOT afford them. One of them would have required me to take out at least a $20,000 loan for the first year, and the others were virtually impossible (about $50,000 just in tuition for each of the two years). I was completely devastated by this at first, but I decided right away to reapply and I'm thankful to say I did much better this time around. So I want to stress that if it comes to you having to take a year off, it is most definitely not over for you! 

 

One of the things I was most worried about in reapplying was that schools would look down upon me for "just taking a year off" and think that I wasn't a serious applicant, but I don't think this was the case for admissions committees (of course, I have no way of knowing, but I think most departments look at your record as a whole). 

 

Also, I was worried that not being offered funding the first time around meant that I was a deficient applicant and not good enough for programs, and it really hurt. If you're feeling at all like that, please try not to. To have been accepted at all should reflect on the quality of your application, and funded offers can always come through the second time around.

 

I know how hard it is to have only unfunded offers to contend with, so I really hope all goes well.

[readallthethings]

Also, as far as I know about wait lists, if you're accepted off of the wait list the program usually offers funding (basically, you'd be getting the same funding offer that a previously accepted applicant turned down). However, it might vary from program to program. 

[andromache]

It seems likely I'll be doing an unfunded or partially funded MA in the fall. It's not ideal, but I don't have much out in loans currently (certainly much less than a lot of former students) and I want to be in graduate school. This was my year off, and where I'm at right now--not ideal for improving my grad apps next year. However, I think I could make the most out of an unfunded MA and really strengthen my resume and my education overall to make myself a strong PhD applicant in a year or two. I'm visiting two departments in the next few weeks, and hopefully I'll get a sense from current MA students of how they've done in an unfunded MA program, and whether they've found it worthwhile. People definitely do unfunded MA programs, and I'm sure they're worthwhile for some of them. I'm hoping it'll be the same for me.