The Semi-Final List

Everyone loves lists. Here's mine (the semi-final version, with one school's response still yet unheard):

University of Illinois - officially accepted
Western Michigan University - accepted (turned down)
Roosevelt University (Chicago) - accepted (turned down)
Purdue University - waitlisted * (turned down)
University of Notre Dame - waitlisted (turned down)
University of Michigan - rejected
Washington University - rejected
University of Iowa - rejected
Indiana University - rejected
Syracuse University - rejected
Ohio State University - rejected
Johns Hopkins - rejected
Columbia College (Chicago) - no answer

* Purdue's selection process relies on a system where the top 15-20 candidates for poetry and fiction each are selected. Out of these candidates, the final slots are eventually filled with permission from the Director of Composition, who has final say. This selection process works as a kind of quasi-waitlist. Details of Purdue's process can be found here.


Some observations. A wise man would tell you that the MFA selection process is at times an incredibly luck-based and arbitrary process. There are countless stories of people getting into Iowa and being rejected from a small state school in the same year. Yet when examining my list, where I got in and waitlisted, and where I did not, there seems, at least to me, an obvious pattern. Simply, that I couldn't crack the very elite schools, the schools that populate the top 20, top 15 lists -- Syracuse, Iowa, Indiana, John Hopkins, Michigan. It seems like a simple enough explanation: I simply wasn't good enough this year. But although I love the simple explanations, I also think it's a little more complicated than that.

There's the obvious question of sample size. Thirteen schools and one year's worth of data is far too little for any meaningful result. And what about school aesthetics? I've also found in my communication with other potential MFAers this year that there seems to be an extremely high correlation between folks who got accepted into Illinois, who also got an offer from Purdue (or waitlisted) and Notre Dame, and vice versa. Coincidence? I don't know. You expect some measure of overlap between the students that schools will fight over -- talent is talent -- but I counted, including myself, about a half dozen people who got a positive response from more than one of the schools I mentioned above. That is an extremely high number for schools that will only have incoming cohorts of 3-5 students apiece. In my opinion, there's definitely a case of school specific aesthetics in play here. And uncoincidentally, it's also a regional pattern -- the schools in the same locations will get a huge overlap of students applying to all or most of the schools in the same general area.

Speculation, of course. All I have to go off of are the schools I've researched and read. I do wonder if these patterns appear in other regions as well. What about the schools in Florida? New York? North Carolina? If I were a betting man, I'd wager that there'd be an overlapping pattern of schools with similar aesthetics, along with a regional pattern of schools pulling from similar application bases and certain locations.