Hi there,
I’m just about to enter my third year at UCL, reading English literature. It’s early days, but I’m very confident that my ultimate aim in life is to complete a Ph.D, get a professorship and get my scholarship published. This summer, I’ve been looking into top American grad schools as their English programmes seem to totally outweigh their UK counterparts. Places like Princeton, U. Chicago and Stanford are definitely my ‘reaches’- I totally understand that arbitrary notions of ‘prestige’ mean nothing when it comes to graduate work and I’m aiming for these schools because their faculties are incredible (my favourite poet, Paul Muldoon, is a writer in residence at Princeton!) and their facilities are fantastic.
Anyway, my question is thus: what can I do, at this (relatively) early stage, to bolster a future application? I’m achieving very highly in UCL’s English department (which is, for those unaware, the oldest and smallest in the UK and definitely up there with Oxbridge in terms of domestic academic respect); I won a departmental scholarship for gaining the highest marks of my year in my papers this year, all of my tutorial essays have been of a high first class standard, etc. I appreciate the importance of the GRE and will definitely take a lot of time to familiarise myself with the testing format/material after I complete my BA. Should I be looking to take on lots of literary extracurriculars in my final year, or would these top schools be more interested in literary work experience (working with a professional poetry society, a publishing firm)? Also, is being published helpful for a humanities graduate programme? There are one or two English studies journals in the UK that publish work solely by undergrads which I am in a good position to submit a paper to.
Thanks!
Unless you want to wait a year between finishing the B.A. and entering a graduate program, you need to take the GRE in Spring of 2016 or at the latest, fall 2016 so that your scores are available for applications which are due in January of 2017.
I am not in your field so I cannot tell you precisely what will make you more attractive to a graduate program but it seems you are doing the right things. Make sure you have three professors who know your work well and can write personal and strong letters of reference for you. This is really important for graduate admissions, all other things being equal.
First, I always feel obligated to pass on that the job market in academia is very terrible, and the job market in English literature is just about the worst of all. You’re at the perfect time of year to follow the [English literature job wiki](English Literature 2015-2016 | Academic Jobs Wiki | Fandom): people post most of the jobs in the field there but also running commentary on the job market.
Actually, I would argue with that. Prestige is very important in academia, and academics are very conscious of status. It’s just that in many fields the schools that are prestigious to the common person off the street aren’t the ones that are prestigious in that field (like people would never know that Wisconsin or Michigan are top schools in my field). However, English literature is one of those fields where the brand-name schools ARE really the most prestigious ones. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Penn, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Chicago - these are some of the top programs in English lit. (Of course, there are also UCLA, Penn State, UNC, Michigan, Berkeley, Arizona State, and the CUNY Grad Center. But many of those publics are also prestigious in the common mind.)
Anyway, the point is that for getting an academic job post-grad school, prestige of your department does matter. A LOT. Particularly if your interest is primarily literary scholarship (i.e., you want to work at a school where you have time to think and write and do research in literature) and less teaching (i.e., you don’t want to work at a school where you have to teach 4-5 classes a semester and don’t have any time to write). It is really, really important that you go to the best-ranked school you can get into. For reference, visit the webpages of universities at which you might like to work and see who was hired into their English department recently (last 5-7 years). See what departments they came from.
I am a social scientist and not an English scholar, but I have some friends in the field so I’m like vaguely secondhand familiar with some of the stuff. My sense is that extracurriculars don’t matter so much, just like they don’t in most grad programs. The things that matter are things directly relevant to the field. So for example, I think most English lit programs require a reading knowledge of two languages by receipt of the PhD - one is usually French or German, and the other is a useful language for whatever area you’re interested in. To ensure success a lot of lit PhD programs are only accepting students who are already pretty good in one language and have started on a second, because you usually have to demonstrate reading proficiency by the end of year 2 or 3. So if you haven’t already, start taking some classes in a language (French or German is probably a good choice, although double-check with your preferred departments).
Literary work experience means pretty much squat. Top English lit programs aren’t really going to care if you work in publishing (although some MFA programs might, if you were interested in writing and not literature). They care about your literary scholarship. You could work in finance for 2 years for all they care, if you managed to keep up some literary scholarship on the side and demonstrated reading knowledge of two languages.
What is helpful is demonstrating that scholarship. It sounds like you take tutorials, which are essentially independent studies; can you work on a tutorial that produces a longer paper? You are going to have to submit a writing sample, so you could do a tutorial that actually centers around the creation of that writing sample (I think they are generally 10-20 pages long) and get semester-long feedback from your professor, which is ideal. You can make it on what you want to study in grad school. And yes, getting published is definitely helpful! Although it should be publication of literary scholarship, not creative writing or something like that.
You might also want to lurk around the Chronicle of Higher Education forums for some additional advice.