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hello fish people.
I know this is a partisanly australian site, but there seem to be plenty of americans here too.
I'm applying to cornell this winter to do a phd in english literature, but being as significantly ignorant as i am, i really can't think which are the best american places to have as a back-up in case the cornell people don't like my application.

I appreciate that most people here seem top be students of something icythylogical or scientificf, but can anyone think of somewhere that is
very academic but not ivy-league (because it's got to be somewhere slightly worse than cornell that i'm almost guaranteed to get into),
isn't horribly expensive to live (this is why im not trying harvard or yale)
isn't too hot, (i hate the heat, being genetically welsh/scottish)
and is a decent place to go in terms of culture and nightlife. say somewhere which fits 3 of those criteria.

my tutors think that virginia is good for english, but neither of them knew why they thought this. I want to do modern american novels mostly, faulkner, pynchon, nabokov, that kind of thing.

any help at all would be hugely appreciated, because now that i've spent all that money doing the GRE it would be a grand waste of my time to not have anywhere to go when plan A falls through.

thanks much
pr

I'm applying to Cornell too--except for undergrad biology.

There are tons of great schools. I suggest you look on http://princetonreview.com. Do a college search and it'll tell you what would be a good fit/reach/saftey school.

I have a friend who is going to New York University Graduate school majoring in theater and english. She loves it. It is expensive, but there are scholarships avaliable.

My mom went to Washington University in Saint Louis. It is an excellent school--well worth looking into.

There are a few state schools are saftey--a place you have no problem getting into.

The best thing to do is look on the princeton review website to research. The Internet is a great tool to take advantage of!

HTH

Last edited by solublefish at 24-Oct-2004 19:48

What are your undergraduate and Master's degrees in? Has it been awhile since you were a student?

If Doctorate programs are like Law Schools, then you should probably apply to 7-9 schools to make sure that you get accepted somewhere. You should pick schools that you're unlikely to get into, schools that you're likely to be accepted to, and schools that you'll definately be accepted to.

I'd take the advice of the poster above and look at Princeton Review. I think that they even have a premium service that tells you like the average GPAs of admitted students, the likelyhood that you'll be accepted as a foreign student, etc. It never hurts to make phone calls to schools that you're interested in, either.










Last edited by RSCutiePie96 at 24-Oct-2004 20:10

Purdue University fits all your qualifications; however, our liberal arts and English departments are not well-known or sought after. Maybe that's what you're looking for. But it's a good school. (Better known for Engineering of various types and Agriculture)

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Hi,
Look into the College of William &amp; Mary in VA.
Funny, having grown up in upstate NY, I always thought
of Cornell as an agriculture, horticulture, veterinary, school. Never thought of it as a place for liberal arts.

Frank


-->>> The Confidence of Amateurs, is the Envy of Professionals <<<--

have had a look on the princeton thing, it's quite useful, though ideally there'd be some thing on the internet that just ranked how good each grad-school was by subject and how much time you spend with tutors, research facilities, library depth and so on.

cornell's got a world-class set of schools for medical sciences, but its english is good as well, no harold bloom type legends, but plenty of young researchers on modern literature. It has teh world's number 1 set of wordsworth manuscripts. but oi ahte wordsworth. it's where nabokov taught and pynchon went, so it has top manuscript stuff for both, and a tropical fishkeeping tutor on pynchon and faulkner who i've been in e-mail conatact with.

my previous degree was a BA in english at oxford uni, finished last year. i talked to the cornell people and i don't need a masters to get on if my application is good enough. it should be, i got 790/700 on my GRE and only just missed a first from oxford, plus i think i have decent written work to submit. my references ought to be top dog too, my tutors were both world leaders in their field and seem to like me.

also, being british i don't have a great grasp of how american grading works. because in britain an average mark of 67.5 would be close to an A, and would be worth more or less depending on which uni it was from. I think i'd have a GPA of about 3.7, but it's an oxford one, so maybe more. I've read about GPA weighting in america, but i have no idea what the criteria are.

anyone have any idea what a british equivalent of the SAT score would be? is this the GRE. I have seen much discussion of it but i don't really understand.

overall I'm pretty sure i'd get in anywhere not ivy league, so i just wondered if someone knew what was generally repputed to be a good school for liberal arts. otherwisee i might just see where my favourite critics are and apply there regardless of school.

thanks for help, and any more would be appreciated.

I'm not 100% sure this will carry over but the acronym's the same so it ought to be - for us, the GRE is a test you take for graduate work. Same for you?
The SATs are what we take before undergrad work - not like A-levels (with good grades and other things you can go to most schools even with horrible SATs), but more like a junior GRE. Meaningful but not the be-all and end-all. Are they asking you to take SATs?

Last edited by LittleMousling at 25-Oct-2004 17:59

-Molly
Visit shelldwellers.com!

GPA are only weighted in some high schools. There is no weighting in universities. If you contact an academic advisor at the school you are interested in you can get more information, they've undoubtedly had to 'translate' grades from one place to another. I've had some fun with that both in high school and university, you're certainly not the only one! Plus, academic advisors or admissions staff are more than willing to help out with stuff like that, even if you don't go to their school.

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Isn't Cornell in the Ivy League??

Actually, I believe it is a land grant school like Purdue. The only other one with a person's name and nothing to do with the state. But it costs a whole lot more (at least for undergrad) like an Ivy League school... I remember looking at Cornell for undergrad (since at the time I was looking at schools with good Ag and vet schools).

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its also an ivy league but how about harvard? they have a WONDERFUL location and reputation, i live nearby and i love the area.

Cornell is an ivy-league school, a land grant school, and a state school. I know for undergrad it is 40,000 dollars, and about 25,000 dollars for the state colleges. They don't offer merit based scolarships, only need-based. That is something you also have to consider when applying.

yeah, as people have said, cornell is ivy league, i just need a backup that isn't.

good to hear about SATS, i saw a load of people talking about them on various college forums and since they were graded the same wierd 200-800 as the GRE i thought they might equate. there's no british equivalent of SATS. happily.

as for harvard, it being brand-name competitive, i only got a 2.1 in my finals (4 marks acrtoss 9 papers off a first), which was not what i should have got, i just screwed 2 papers. as such, it's pretty unlikely i would have got a merit scholarship, they're not as generous as cornell with teaching fellowships, and massachussets is one of the most expensive uni-town states in the US (not, to be honest, that ithaca is miles behind). As such i would have had no chance whatsoever of surviving financially for 5 years.

whereas having talked to some cornell dons, if i do teaching i won't pay a penny in tuition fees for the whole 5 years, they have plenty of grants for students (there aren't any official admission-based merit scholarships, but there are loads and loads of things to get for graduates, esp overseas) and it's still meant to be one of the top 10 english courses for graduates in teh states.

also, a friend of mine is applying to harvard and yale, and it would have been a bit evil to be playing off against each other. (because i would probably have lost)
Ann Arbor and Virgnia seem to be the 2 places that my tutors think are good, also maybe chicago. I had independently heard some good things about purdue as a place, though i know nothing about its english faculty.

texas A&amp;M university, the only college in the united states with land, sea, and air grants. Also rated as one of the top ten here in the states. also my father runs the alumni assoc. and he helps people yerly attend

me

Ooh, Chicago's a great school, and apparently free enough with their fellowships - my father had one there, and he had a *very* spotty academic record at the time.

-Molly
Visit shelldwellers.com!

More about Purdue - well I don't know a whole lot about the faculty... I do know that a lot of times PhD students teach basic composition classes... I know I had one. But then again there are some poets among the faculty (I only know because I took a poetry class). And there are some pretty interesting classes at least on the undergrad/English major side of things. I've had friends who took a Tolkein class... many minoring in English taking Bible as Lit... which seems very popular... ummm don't know a whole lot but there is a lot of variety. I had the chance to take Native American Lit. This last semester, but since I'm not majoring or minoring in anything to do with it I turned it down. Had a great teacher for poetry though. The English department here is definitely better than some of the departments as far as teaching goes... the math department is probably the worst... Anyway, maybe that'll help you.

Also, I believe that if you teach then you get a very good deal. That's what my graduate chem TA told me last semester at least.

Last edited by superlion at 26-Oct-2004 19:05

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