Introduction

If you’re reading these words, you have probably already sampled the unique terror and isolating confusion that comes along with applying to graduate school. Having recently survived the application process myself, I created this blog as a support tool for the poor souls who have yet to complete their applications. After hearing back from my schools, I tried to compose the guide that I myself could have benefited from as I struggled through the application process. The following bite-size entries guide you through what I consider to be the crucial steps, starting more than one year before you plan to apply for doctoral study. Most of my entries address issues that I’d never even considered before applying. Hopefully you, the reader, will benefit from my hindsight, compulsively organized into 20 steps.

Two important points before you begin reading the official guide:

First, my guide is based on the experience of applying to interdisciplinary, humanities-based programs. In other words, my blog explains how one applies to programs in English, other literary/cultural programs based on a national literature, cultural studies, philosophy, art history, comparative literature, critical theory/studies, film studies, media studies, women’s/feminist/gender studies, and the like. This focus also means that my own academic activity is highly interdisciplinary, or that I get around a lot in my research, and that the guide therefore reflects my disciplinarily slutty tendencies.

Second, the programs to which I applied only accept between two and nine students per year. I knew, starting out, that no matter how brilliant my application was, I would be rejected from most schools. There are many factors that go into the evaluation of applications, one of which is unfortunately sheer lack of space within a given program. Acceptance or rejection does not necessarily reflect how flawlessly you performed the application process, but for what it’s worth: of the nine schools, I was accepted to Northwestern’s Comp Lit Studies program with a five-year fellowship, SUNY Binghamton’s Philosophy, Literature and the Theory of Criticism program with a variable fellowship, and SUNY Stony Brook’s Comp Lit program with a 4-year fellowship. I was rejected from U of Minnesota’s Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program, Berkeley’s Rhetoric program, Penn’s Comp Lit program, Duke’s Program in Literature, Irvine’s Comp Lit program, and NYU’s Comp Lit program. I am now a first-year doctoral student at Northwestern. If you’re interested in learning more about my work and teaching, follow the links in the sidebar to your right.

Okay folks, buckle your seatbelts and dust off your long-term planning skills, because we’re in for quite a ride…