on prepreprofessionalisation

This is long and disorganised and the things I want to say don’t really follow in any especially cogent way.

I don't really know how to contribute to this in a sensitive way, because I feel like I still don't really have any idea of what works and what doesn't. My status as an international student is complicated and so engaging in comparing metrics etc is, I think at least in my case, a largely futile exercise. The principle things I did differently this time around were to network with professors as much as I could and to work on my sample. I tailored my sample quite closely to my schools and very closely to myself. I've said all this before elsewhere.

A quick note on publications: a friend of mine who has a publication forthcoming in Tulsa Women's Studies (so ... kind of a big deal) and conference papers accepted at two major international conferences, with an excellent set of undergraduate and graduate transcripts (in fact, some of the best graduate results achieved at Oxford since the inception of the course) and good GREs still only got into one graduate school. She tailored her apps, and basically did everything that you should do, and still was rejected almost everywhere.

I guess my morals from this are that:

a) despite what some posters on here have been saying, luck *is* an element: yes, you will deserve the place that you get, certainly, but so also will someone else whose place you have taken. You were lucky; they were unlucky;

b) Having a publication in one of the most prestigious journals in her field still didn't get her into some of the schools she wanted the most.

Because really, this whole 'publishable' thing is slightly wrong-ended: it's one thing to demonstrate your commitment to the professional aspect of graduate school, and goodness knows that that is something that we're all alert to, but in truth we're going to graduate school so that we can publish in the future, not the other way around. Some faculty I spoke to explicitly said that they preferred less professionalised applicants, for which I guess there could be all sorts of good and bad reasons, amongst which would be, I'd expect, that a graduate programme is invested in your formation as a scholar, and that if you come already formed they'll say 'Ok well that's great, but what do you want from us?'. All the websites that we've read, in which programmes say just what it is that they are looking for in an applicant, don't say that they want evidence of high-octane scholarship right off the bat. They want *potential*. Acceptance letters seem to say 'in recognition of your potential'.

What I'm getting at here is that you need to defer to programmes, I think, to say 'Here I am and I'm yours to mould'. Even coming from an MA I don't think it's reasonable to expect something publishable. 'Publishable' is, by the way, a really unfair stick for us applicants to beat ourselves with: how can we have peer review from people who aren't even our peers? An MA is a one or two year course and I don't see how it's reasonable to expect a student to achieve in that period that scholarly development that is in fact that goal of the Ph.D. programme itself; the 'ability to participate in the profession'.

I don't have anything substantive to offer in place of this, and in that sense I'm guilty of offering only destructive criticism. I think that the anxieties that we have about showing ad comms our work are really manifestations of anxieties that riddle literary academia in general: what is work, and when are we doing it? (This is a line of thought I'm cribbing from an amazing article I read, called Fasting at the Feast of Literature, by Brenda Marchovsky, and if I had an athens account I'd quote it here.) Is work comprised to some extent in our ability to marginalise and co-opt an area of study? I mean: does being 'professional' inhere in producing work that amateurs or lay people by definition wouldn't read or write themselves? (Am I just trying to demonstrate professional competency here? Probably, yes.)

So from this it follows that bandying around the criteria that a sample be 'publishable' that the graduate application is necessarily not an enjoyable process. It is a process that requires, in fact, that we subject ourselves to a set of entailments. We can't submit samples that say 'I love this' or 'I need this' or 'This piece of literature is integral to my sense of self' because those sentiments are deemed to be amateur. And yet those sentiments or ones like them are precisely what make have made us go through this whole thing: it's an irritating and useless paradox that to demonstrate readiness for a process we are required to show that we've already undergone it, that we've already viably transformed our undergraduate, passionate essays into invested but professional work.

Ok I'm done pontificating. I just think that the way that even this thread is a long and subtle investigation into how better to tailor an application or set of applications is fairly indicative of the way that this profession worries over intellectual value and self-worth: when is our work acceptable, and to whom? How can we produce work that will make us both professionally successful and personally satisfied? I don’t think we’re even sure that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Hence the anxiety, and the feeling rubbish, and the double vulnerability that the process engenders. Ok and now I really am done. Thanks for bearing with this. Thoughts?