<p>I am currently an Undergrad majoring in English at Cal. I am planning on applying to English PhD programs within the next 2 years. My current overall GPA is a 3.7 and my in-major GPA is a 3.85 or thereabouts. However, I took 2 language classes Pass/Not Pass in my second semester and ended up not passing either; there were some reasons for this, but nothing that would fly as a "personal emergency" on an application. I have taken the GRE and scored a 1580 (800 Math, 780 Verbal); I have not yet taken the English Literature GRE. I have not secured letters of recommendation, but I have yet to finish my English curriculum here, which, in the next year and a half or so, should include several seminars and courses with instructors I have had before. I trust in my ability to secure decent letters from three professors in the department. In terms of extracurriculars, I have very little and haphazard, material, which is one of the troubling things: I volunteered as a writing/reading tutor at local schools a few semesters, worked for the DNC (which has nothing to do with my discipline) for a few months, and have held an on-and-off internship at an art museum for the past several years. Do you think, with a bomb-ass statement of purpose and writing sample, I'd have a shot at top ten or fifteen programs: ideally, Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, etc. I am also planning on taking German or Latin this summer.</p>
<p>No one will care about your extracurriculars or lack thereof. These are not mentioned in applications to graduate programs.</p>
<p>Your writing sample and statement of purpose will be the keys to admission, along with (most importantly!) your fit with specific faculty in the departments to which you are applying.</p>
<p>Yeah I’m applying to all those programs right now. Fit is key. For example, I doubt you have true compatibility with both Yale and Harvard. Yale focuses on modernism/post-modernism and is heavily theoretical. It is also a novel-centric school (although Bloom is there - I hear he’s aloof and relatively uninteresting as an advisor). Harvard is very much a poetry school, more interested in formalism, new historicism (obviously with Greenblatt on the faculty), composition, and cultural studies.</p>
<p>hmm so you don’t think those NP’s in language courses will heavily affect my chances?<br>
I’m not going to be applying for at least another few semesters, so I have not really done my research as far as the emphases of different programs are concerned. I guess I’ve been sort of assuming that other top English departments are more or less similar to Berkeley’s, which I would say is more along the lines of how you described Harvard, with most of the professors I’ve had operating under the assumption of something like Greenblatt’s New Historicism. But Berkeley seems to have quite a few PoMo people as well–I think I’ve just avoided taking too many of those classes. How did you go about researching the programs you are applying to?</p>
<p>you have to look individually at every department website, look at the professors there and what their research is about. look at graduate student profiles and see the kind of work graduate students are already doing in the department. there is no one-stop shopping for this, you’ll have to do all the leg work yourself. i’ve got a 5 page spreadsheet of every latin americanist or caribbeanist in the US. it’s part of the process. think about the kind of research you want to do as a scholar and go there.</p>
<p>look at the (academic) books you love and find out where those professors teach. picking a graduate school is NOT like picking an undergraduate school. you have to go where your research interests match the strengths of a particular department, and that often means not applying to all (or any) ivy league schools.</p>
<p>the no-passes in languages may hurt you. humanities programs require two foreign language proficiencies for the PhD. you can enter a masters program with only one foreign language under your belt, though two would improve your chances of admission. you need to get to the point where you can read academic articles in a foreign language and understand them with the aid of a (very big) dictionary. if you can do that, you have “enough” of the language. if you can’t, that should be your focus during the remainder of your undergraduate education.</p>
<p>some programs will specify that they want the equivalent of two or three years in a given language. since you only have one and a half years left, i would STRONGLY recommend putting a language class into your schedule next semester, and not as pass-fail either. your transcript will need to demonstrate that you’ve had some successful training in a foreign language.</p>
<p>if you plan on applying in fall 2010 for admission in 2011, then next semester and summer 2010 are the only courses that will make it onto your transcript when you apply. you can say that you’re going to pick up a language in your final year, but anyone can say that. you need something concrete to show admissions committees that you’re working towards at least one foreign language.</p>
<p>your GREs are excellent so i’m a bit surprised you failed language classes, but then i guess real life happens and we don’t always have excuses. my transcript is littered with C’s (spanish and economics) but i made it into a solid grad program, so the fails won’t kill your application outright, but you do need to take language classes immediately, and for an actual grade, if you want to get into a PhD program in two years.</p>