savage self-involvement; backdated

I haven’t written anything here for a while of any real substance, for explanations of which see every other life-gets-in-the-way post on the internet. I’m spending this Christmas in St. Louis with XXX and her parents, which is truly wonderful. Her parents are kind, genial, funny people, but spending Christmas with XXX has been the best present I could have asked for. I don’t care if it sounds cheesy.

[...]

I suppose part of the reason that I don’t write much here is that I don’t do much of my emotional thinking in writing any more – I do it by talking with XXX . When I do sit down to write something that isn’t a tedious email, or a piece of work, I’m more likely to struggle with some half-formed idea of a lyric poem than I am to update this. It’s loathsomely pop-psychologistic to say that, then, writing poetry is my outlet, (outlet for what? Narcissism? Self-promotion? Dimly-glimpsed fantasies of art? Who knows.) but it’ll do.

I spent the previous fortnight in England, with a week at my father’s and a week at my mother’s. The best part was seeing my sister and a few dear and much-missed friends from university. The parents were both rather depressed in their different ways. I’m trying to learn not to take that personally, or to imagine that it is up to me to solve their problems for them. It is a hard lesson to learn.

Really, I feel oddly suspended between studenthood and ‘real-life.’ I was nominated for membership at my father’s club – which is full of unspeakable cunts, needless to say – and they waggishly put my occupation down as ‘dilettante.’ I work very hard, but it isn’t work with tangible outcomes, or work that fits into any particular sector. Really, I suppose am serving what used to be called an apprenticeship. I am weirdly hostile to suggestions that what I do isn’t hard work, or that I am a ‘perpetual student.’ I think that these are pretty usual insecurities and that I probably don’t need to worry about them.

I had a ridiculous encounter in a cafeteria last month and have been since wondering what poise is – because poise seems to me to be an affected self-sufficiency that you learn to internalise. Someone blew up at me and I didn’t blow up back, although I did feel sick for half an hour afterwards.

I’ve had a pretty materialistic year. I’ve bought boots, shoes, jumpers, t-shirts, and jeans. I crashed my car twice (the second time reasonably seriously) but I’m ok. I keep forgetting to go to an osteopath. I steal a lot of music from the internet and keep in touch with my friends only sporadically. After September-October-November, I started a higher dosage of anti-depressants, and they continue to help me live like a functional human being. I drink an awful lot of coffee. XXX and I cook for each other most nights and watch a film, or the X-Files, or Buffy. We usually work until one or two in the morning. We take a lot of care of each other. I think we are hollowing out a space for ourselves. It takes a long time, and it feels like we have to push against a lot of stuff to make it happen, and I like it.

I have limitations. That makes me sad.

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?

Re: Thoughts on a rejection list for schools

This is very interesting indeed for a couple of reasons. Firstly, what happened last year was that once people had got into their top programs they would tell the message board when they had turned down subsequent offers; this was by and large a popular thing to do, especially considering the tact with which it was done, by and large.

Secondly, I think that it is fascinating that you suggest that we centrally co-ordinate something. Just as our efforts to professionalise are to some extent efforts to preempt the requirements of graduate school, as if to say "I'm ready for this because I have already undertaken some of its steps" or "My committment is shown in my willingness to do this (conferences, article submissions, whatever it might be) even without the assurance of doctoral candidacy behind me”, so too I think our efforts to be exemplary at the admissions procedure, in everything from statements and samples to this board, we’re demonstrating competence (if only to ourselves) as far as we can, and possibly even in excess of what’s required.

I’ve been thinking about the hurdles and hoop-jumping of the admissions process, and I think that it is in a way a self-selecting series of inconveniences, as though by making it that much harder to apply correctly, departments try to get only the most committed applicants. And so we are trying to show ourselves to be at the very top of that bracket. There was some chitchat about this on last year’s board, about pre-professionalisation (and what one ex-applicant refers to as prepreprofessionalisation), and what I think is especially interesting is that applicants are using the internet to apply ever more cannily: whilst departments are (we can only imagine) at most, just beginning to think that boards like this might be worth looking at, and if only in a voyeuristic way, for some of us the suggestions, support and information we share here are actually kind of important (and will only get more so as things get going in February).

I’m sorry for this rather boring screed. (Screed is my new favourite word.) In its own way, your idea of unionising on school priorities (which would in itself be fascinating – a kind of demand-side set of rankings – we could classify by area of interest and argue about criteria – it’d be great) is a great idea. But it needs to happen outside of this message board, somewhere both collective and private. I like that it would represent a collective movement; it think it would say something about how we feel about admissions boards, that we’re ourselves unionised against and need to compensate for that.