fit

As far as fit goes, I can't think of anything more important. I submitted applications that showed me in different lights to different schools. I'm interested in a variety of things, and so some of my applications were literary-historical, some theoretical, and some a Polonius-like combination of the three, according to which of my interests would best serve and be served by the school in question.

What it comes down to is this: you will be spending at least 6 years in a school, and over that period what will count to you more than prestige or standing - so much more - is how congenial the school is to the kind of thing you want to study - and the way that you want to study it.

Forgive me if I seem rude. You have another year to sort all of this out. But talking as you do about "fit bullshit" implies that you don't care what you study, as long as you do it somewhere with a prestigious name. Professors everywhere but everywhere are likely to be smart, inspiring people to greater or lesser extents. You might as well apply based on what they do, not where they do it.

Imagine if you got into a big name school and went eager to study, say - I don't know - Paradise Lost and the civil war, but when you got there you were told that you had to study, say, historical and social circumstances of production of civil war pamphleteering and the modes of their consumption. Wouldn't you feel that your cynical opportunism had really screwed things over for you?

Finally - your comments on how to take failure are... interesting. Sure, be confident in your own quality. But if last year I had not sucked it up, but thought instead that the schools just hadn't recognised my calibre, I would have submitted the same app, and I'm sure I'd facing 15 rejections, instead of last year's seven. I wouldn't have gone on conferences and given papers, and submitted things to journals, and spent months rewriting my statements and sample.

This is the point of learning - people who know more than you tell you that you are wrong, and it hurts and you take it and then you get better. Entrenchment won't ever lead to progress.