Scared of what lies ahead...

[Ilikekitties]

Hi all. Last year was my first round of applying to graduate programs for cultural anthropology. I applied to 9 PhD programs and 2 MA programs. Unfortunately, I was only admitted to one MA program with minimal funding. Instead of attending grad school this fall, I will be heading to China to teach English at a university for one year.

To be honest, I'm scared shitless to apply again. I faced so much rejection. In terms of improvement, I think that I can be more strategic about who I choose to recommend me and hopefully I can choose a better writing sample. My GRE scores are shit, but I can't afford to take the exam again. Of course, my statements can always be improved and I would have more sets of eyes reading them this time around. I think that I will apply to more MA programs this time around because I still don't know what I wanna do with my life.

I'm just so scared. Scared of rejection and scared of what lies ahead (because I know what lies ahead). Getting all those rejections back was not easy. What if it happens all over again? What if this proves that I'm not cut out for grad school? What if I can't give committees what they want to see in terms of a well-thought-out project?

On the bright side, my GPA improved slightly since last fall and I graduated SCL. I also am glad now that I'm going to take a job rather than enter school again in the fall. I think that it will give me a fresh perspective, because otherwise I would have been entering fresh out of undergrad. Admissions probably won't care though because I'll have to be a good fit anyway.

Here's to not dying come December...

[rising_star]

If you can't afford to take the GRE again and you are concerned about improving your writing sample, maybe you should wait, rather than applying this year.

[Bschaefer]

Hey Peanut,

Don't take the rejection personal, some schools only look to see if you meet dept. requirements and then give a thorough lookover of the application. Plus you'll have your experience in China too. In terms of recommenders, You should always ask for the to write a strong letter and send them both your CV and SOP. That can only help and improve it. Though you said you can't take them again, if you can or find a way to explain this, then do it. For your project, don't get bogged down - these change very frequently, if anything I would focus more on the theoretical or methodological platform for research in X culture. 

 

Applying to Masters is smart if you are still unsure about your long term future plans, but look for programs that offer Masters funding too. I know it's hard not to stres out about this but you just need to take it day by day

[Ilikekitties]

8 hours ago, rising_star said:

If you can't afford to take the GRE again and you are concerned about improving your writing sample, maybe you should wait, rather than applying this year.

I'm probably going to use a different writing sample

[rising_star]

@Peanut, different doesn't automatically mean better. You'll want to make sure your writing sample is the strongest you can possibly make it, ideally by having it reviewed by current grad students and your faculty advisors to ensure it's a solid piece of academic work. If you can't do that, then you may be wasting your money by reapplying now, rather than waiting.

[Ilikekitties]

7 minutes ago, rising_star said:

@Peanut, different doesn't automatically mean better. You'll want to make sure your writing sample is the strongest you can possibly make it, ideally by having it reviewed by current grad students and your faculty advisors to ensure it's a solid piece of academic work. If you can't do that, then you may be wasting your money by reapplying now, rather than waiting.

I understand that of course. Regarding the sample that I submitted last year, one professor loved it and some others did not because they did not think that it was methodologically sound. The main issue in a nutshell was basically that I made assumptions about what I would find and used them to inform my research question, when I should have had a much broader research question that did not make assumptions. I conducted another project this past fall/spring under more faculty supervision, so I would assume that it would be at least a little more methodologically sound.

What was strange though was that the project that I conducted in spring 2015 had some pretty heavy proposal edits, so somehow the proposal was methodologically sound but some profs did not like the way that I approached the research.

Edited August 2, 2016 by Peanut

[knp]

Going to live in a new country for an extended period of time is already a brave and scary step—it's okay to decide that taking on one major challenge this year is enough! I was taking on a huge new project last fall, but I couldn't hack both that and graduate school applications, so I ended up dropping the project. It might be wise to reserve a bit of emotional energy for your teaching and living efforts this year. I'm sure you could both teach at the university and apply to graduate school, but it also sounds, from the emotion words you used in your first post here, like doing so will make you miserable. Why not put off graduate school for a cycle and aim for less misery this year?

[Ilikekitties]

7 minutes ago, knp said:

Going to live in a new country for an extended period of time is already a brave and scary step—it's okay to decide that taking on one major challenge this year is enough! I was taking on a huge new project last fall, but I couldn't hack both that and graduate school applications, so I ended up dropping the project. It might be wise to reserve a bit of emotional energy for your teaching and living efforts this year. I'm sure you could both teach at the university and apply to graduate school, but it also sounds, from the emotion words you used in your first post here, like doing so will make you miserable. Why not put off graduate school for a cycle and aim for less misery this year?

My program of choice only accepts apps for odd years, so it'd have to be this year. I think that I could handle applying again and teaching. Last fall I did have a lighter course load, but I wrote a research proposal. I have essays written that I could spruce up, so it's not like I'd be starting from scratch like last year. We'll see. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.

Edited August 2, 2016 by Peanut

[knp]

On 8/1/2016 at 8:51 PM, Peanut said:

I think that I could handle applying again and teaching.

Right, but can you happily handle applying again, teaching, and living in a foreign country where you don't know the language? (If you do speak Chinese fluently, the following is still going to apply if you haven't spent a lot of time in the country. If I've misread your profile/interests and you're a heritage speaker going to China to teach in a university in a city where you've spent every other summer your whole life and have a lot of family, never mind, carry on.) Because all three of those things are quite difficult. Applying to graduate school is emotionally taxing, and so are the first few years of teaching or of living in a new country. Are you in China yet? I flamed out of my one attempt to work abroad rather dramatically a couple years ago—in a new country, but in a language in which I was then very good—largely because I was making life more difficult for myself outside of work in ways that rather parallel the PhD application process.

Look, I'm not saying don't do it, but I worry you're underestimating how big the transition to living in China is going to be. Not that the transition will be bad, just that it'll be time- and energy-consuming and that it might not leave enough time and/or energy left over to both apply to graduate school and to let you avoid falling into a situational depression. Does your university in China renew its contracts, ever? If yes I wouldn't take that possibility off the table until you've been working there for a few months. Final thoughts: 1) there are worse things than going to your ideal program after three years out of college—the same time I have taken—rather than only one. 2) If you do apply this year, maybe consider just applying to the odd-years PhD, or just that and like two master's degrees, and leave the full-scale effort for further down the line.

[Ilikekitties]

1 minute ago, knp said:

Right, but can you happily handle applying again, teaching, and living in a foreign country where you don't know the language? (If you do speak Chinese fluently, the following is still going to apply if you haven't spent a lot of time in the country. If I've misread your profile/interests and you're a heritage speaker going to China to teach in a university in a city where you've spent every other summer your whole life and have a lot of family, never mind, carry on.) Because all three of those things are quite difficult. Applying to graduate school is emotionally taxing, and so are the first few years of teaching or of living in a new country. Are you in China yet? I flamed out of my one attempt to work abroad rather dramatically a couple years ago—in a new country, but in a language in which I was then very good—largely because I was making life more difficult for myself outside of work in ways that rather parallel the PhD application process.

Look, I'm not saying don't do it, but I worry you're underestimating how big the transition to living in China is going to be. Not that the transition will be bad, just that it'll be time- and energy-consuming and that it might not leave enough time and/or energy left over to both apply to graduate school and to let you avoid falling into a situational depression. Does your university in China renew its contracts, ever? If yes I wouldn't take that possibility off the table until you've been working there for a few months. Final thoughts: 1) there are worse things than going to your ideal program after three years out of college—the same time I have taken—rather than only one. 2) If you do apply this year, maybe consider just applying to the odd-years PhD, or just that and like two master's degrees, and leave the full-scale effort for further down the line.

I do not speak Chinese and I will be leaving for China at the end of the month. I have lived abroad before (not in China) so I have gone through the various ups and downs of culture shock and the like. Not that my other experiences abroad will prepare for living in a place in which I don't know the language, but I'm familiar with the feeling of living abroad in a foreign setting.

The university that I will be teaching at does renew contracts, but I'm pretty sure that they have to invite you back.

I'm not sure about the number of programs that I will apply to. This year, I'm thinking quality over quantity. Perhaps fewer than 11 or 12 programs so that I will be able to spend more time on each app. This is something that I will talk over with a recommender or two of mine.

I also don't have the luxury of waiting to apply next year. In college I was part of a program that aimed to get students from underrepresented backgrounds into PhD programs right after graduation, so they depend on numbers for funding (getting students into PhD programs and hopefully seeing the students complete them). I could be wrong about this, but they may need a certain percentage of each cohort in a PhD program within X amount of years. Basically, they want us in grad school. This, however, does not detract from the fact that I want to apply this fall if I can.

[knp]

Ah, so, that program. I've heard about it, but I'm not sure: do you need to apply this year because you're associated with them and they will give you more money if you apply this year? Or is it a guilt thing for their past support? Would you going to a master's degree meet whatever criteria they have for what you should be doing next year? Can you apply to just one PhD program and a bunch of master's degrees, and have that 'count' for having tried to enter a PhD program? What if you apply and you don't get in, does that 'count'?

I'm afraid, though, that I don't understand why you want to apply this fall. Why you have to, sure, but not the wanting. When I was graduated from college, I was also scared of what came next, and very interested in graduate school but full of too many emotions to approach it with the degree of emotional stability I wanted. (I.e., I waited to reach the point where I could get negative feedback on work or get rejected from more than half of the PhD programs to which I applied, including the first three that responded to me, and be only sad or disappointed, rather than going into a despair spiral.) So I made exactly the opposite decision from you: I waited to apply until the fear had receded. While with the diversity of human choice etc., I'm sure there are situations where the opposite decision from my own is the best one to make, I feel like I'm having trouble saying anything helpful.  I could come up with lots of advice for how to apply this fall if we treat it as something unpleasant, something that's not ideal this year but that for external reasons you have to do, if you want that. But I'm stuck on how to square my philosophy that it's best to avoid things that will exponentially increase your misery quotient with you saying that even without this program, you'd want to apply again this fall. Do you feel you have gotten anything helpful out of this thread? I feel like I am not necessarily responding to the questions you are actually asking or most want answered, so if you ID those either I could take another try—not ideal—or hopefully somebody with more relevant opinions might swing through and respond to the update.

[Ilikekitties]

I was allowed a certain amount of money from them last year and I used all of that. The profs who I talked to about the program didn't like the fact that students were pushed into going straight into grad school from undergrad, which is what every other person in my cohort is doing besides me. I don't know if doing a terminal MA degree would "count," but one other student is entering an MS program. They will want me to apply this fall because they'll want me to have a "next step" after China. Applying and not getting in and not applying and doing something else are very different things for them. Most of the students from my year are entering PhD programs this fall, but only a slight majority from the previous year are in grad school. This may impact it, too.

That's an interesting take: waiting to apply until you had no fear of rejection. I have always feared rejection for things like this, but when I found myself getting rejected from programs this spring, I felt okay because I knew that I had a backup plan. As long as the alternative (to grad school) sounds like a good plan, I don't think that I'd be as upset. Sure I'd be bummed for a while, but this spring I got over it quickly and had the mentality of "well, it was just meant to be."

I know that grad school isn't really "school," but if anything I think that this gap year will show me that I really miss most (not all) aspects of academia. I will miss the mentorship and the class discussions and the interesting readings and research, but I won't miss other aspects, like the drama between faculty and the "need" to feel validated by grades and professors. At least grad school isn't about grades! But stakes for funding are higher.

And maybe I'll end up loving teaching. A student who graduated a few years before me did a teaching Fulbright and then taught in the US after he got his MA in literature. Now he's entering a PhD program at Harvard *knowing* that he wants to be a teacher. For me, that is a precious thing. I still don't know if I want to teach/be a professor full time.

When I ask myself "would I rather spend my time doing anything else in my 20s?" I can't think of anything else. I've always admired faculty and grad students and I've wanted to attend grad school since freshman year.