Retrospective: The Importance of Choosing Wisely

The list of schools you choose to apply to is important. Even before you start applying in the months of November, December, and January, the very act of choosing is important. Why? The list is a malleable thing, right? If you don't like this school, just remove it, and if you like that school, just add it? Which is true. In fact, I was constantly tinkering with my school list weeks, days before I was set to start applying. I added a couple schools at the last second on a whim. I removed one on another whim. There's no doubt that choosing where to apply to is more art than science; these are the realities of applying to grad school. And if I had unlimited resources with unlimited man-hours, I would have applied to every last school in the country. But that's the problem -- who has over a thousand bucks to spare? Who has forty, fifty hours of free time to spend on applying to grad schools during the holidays? Resources are finite, and when applying, even if it is as many schools as twelve, thirteen, fourteen, you truly have to make every one count.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. As wise man Tom Kealey says, there are many factors that one should keep in mind when compiling a list, each of which have varying degrees of importance, depending on the individual. But they are (in no particular order): funding, location, faculty, prestige, length of program, size of cohort. Give or take a few factors, depending on your personal preference. For me, funding and location trumped the list, which I imagine it probably did (and will) for many individuals. But let's forget about the what was most important to me. I think at the end of it all, there's an exceedingly important question everyone has to ask themselves before sinking the time, money, and energy into applications, a question that I did not always ask myself in compiling my schools list: When faced with a hypothetical acceptance from a particular school with no other acceptances, would you be able to, hands down, take that offer? This question obviously scales with what's important to you on the list. If funding is vital, then you'd have to ask yourself the same question, except include the "worst case scenario" funding situation -- ie, accepted to Columbia, but with no funding. Would you still take the offer with no other prospects on the horizon?

I know this seems like an exceedingly obvious question to ask, building a "worst case scenario" situation, but I can't tell you how difficult it was to be this honest with myself in creating the list. There was a tremendous pull to just throw any school that met my minimum standards on the list, and let them sort it out in the end. The problem was that this strategy was unreasonable when it came to application time. Was it really realistic to spend around $80 on application fees, printing materials, postage, and countless man-hours on a school in another state, another timezone that ultimately provided little to no funding? For me, such a scenario was unrealistic. While it's true that the first application is really the hardest, each following application did not become linearly easier to compile with time. If anything, the complexity of assembling all the materials stayed the same -- I simply became more adept with putting it together. And yet, I cannot tell you how many hours I spent checking and rechecking each item to make sure I had every "i" dotted, and still made significant mistakes; one on my manuscript, another on my applications. Mistakes can and will happen.

I guess what I'm saying is that my list could've been better constructed, with what I now know and what I have experienced. I don't regret the outcome, not for a second. Yet I wonder what my application season would've looked like had I omitted Syracuse (for location reasons) and Western Michigan (for funding reasons) from the list. If every other school had rejected me, save for WMU, I doubt that I would've been able to attend without a sniff of funding. If Syracuse had accepted me, I wonder how easy it would have been for me to say yes, based on personal situations. Would I have been better served to add the University of Minnesota and Southern Illinois in place of those schools? Who knows. Choosing between 2-4 acceptances is tough enough. Having to choose between waiting for next year's application season and an unfunded offer (or worse, a fully funded offer that you can't attend for personal/locational reasons) is tougher.

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.

Tuesday Review

A rejection on Monday, via mail. The culprit: Syracuse. Not a big surprise, like the other rejections. This one is less painful than most of the others, as I'd been just waiting for the letter at this point, and the idea of picking up and moving all the way to the state of New York was a little unrealistic. It's good to know for sure, however.

Also an acceptance today, via phone call, from Roosevelt University at Chicago, which I unfortunately had to turn down.

At any rate, this past week and a half has been a doozy, by far the busiest in terms of rejection and acceptance news. It is interesting how in the course of five weeks (from the beginning of February to the first week of March) I got four responses, and in the last week and a half, I got six more. I guess this time of year is the real active part of the season. The revised list:

University of Illinois - accepted
Western Michigan University - accepted
Roosevelt University (Chicago) - accepted
Purdue University - waitlisted *
University of Notre Dame - waitlisted
University of Michigan - rejected
Washington University - rejected
University of Iowa - rejected
Indiana University - rejected
Syracuse University - rejected

* 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.


No news:

Ohio State University
Johns Hopkins
Columbia College (Chicago)

Rejection #2

The Michigan rejection came in the mail today, and like the Washington University rejection, this one is very kind, very gracious. A snippet: "Please know that our decision is meant to negate neither your talent nor your prospects -- it is simply our collective judgment that others have first claim on our attention at present... We wish you every success in pursuing further study." I know a rejection by any other name is still a rejection, but I am nonetheless incredibly grateful for the supportive and kind words, even if they are in stock letter form.

Also interesting, the letter quoted that "this was among the most impressive group of applicants in the program's history, and also the most numerous," accepting fewer than "5% of our applicants." I'm sure they say that every year is among their "most impressive group of applicants," but in terms of pure numbers, I had heard that Michigan had received more than 700 applications this year, which, of course, goes hand in hand with plummeting acceptance rates. With application numbers being quoted as being up across the board anywhere from 50-100%, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone how competitive this year is and will continue to be in comparison to years past.

At any rate, it's good to finally know about Michigan. That brings my batting average to one out of three, which I fully expect to get much worse in the coming days:

University of Illinois - accepted
University of Michigan - rejected
Washington University - rejected


Schools that I expect rejections from, based on news/already notified acceptances/general pessimism:

University of Iowa
Ohio State University
Indiana University
Purdue University
John Hopkins


And the rest (schools that have had little to no acceptance news as of yet):

University of Notre Dame
Syracuse University
Western Michigan University
Columbia College (Chicago)
Roosevelt University (Chicago)

$1,138

School is expensive. We all know that. But with a little luck and a lot of preparation, school is something we won't have to pay a dime for. Yet, looking over my last two month's credit card bills, I've come to realize that the actual act of applying to schools is pretty darn expensive too. Thirteen schools, thirteen application fees. GRE test fees. Training materials. Mailing applications through priority mail. It all adds up. Consider my application fees alone:

Columbia College - $35
Roosevelt University - $25
Notre Dame - $35
University of Michigan - $60
John Hopkins - $75
Syracuse - $75
Ohio State University - $40
Washington University (St. Louis) - $45
University of Illinois - $60
University of Iowa - $60
Indiana University - $50
Western Michigan - $40
Purdue University - $55

Thirteen schools, thirteen application fees for a total of $655. Wow. But the fun doesn't stop there. Let's look at all the fees associated with the GREs:

GRE Test - $140 to take the test once, which I did.
GRE Scores Reports - Four school reports were free, but anything over that was extra. Extra score reports will cost you $20 a pop. It's a freaking scam, but you can read my earlier posts to get an idea on how I feel about the ETS. I had to send score reports for 11 schools, which means I paid for seven schools, for a total of $140.
Miscellaneous testing materials - I spent a bit on extra preparation materials. I bought Barron's GRE Test Prep, which was $25, access to tests on MyGRETutor.com, which was $5, and the tests on 800score.com, which was $20. All for a total of $50.

So that brings the GRE fees to a total of $330. And we're not done just yet. Mailing the applications was also a surprising amount of change too:

Materials - Manila folders, new printer cartridge, envelopes, mailing labels, and a whole ream of printing paper. Total: approximately $75.
Priority mail through USPS - I mailed each application over priority mail using the USPS, which provided a nice confirmation number for each application to let me know when each was mailed. They ran approximately $6 each, which was $78.

Okay. So let's total this up. Application fees - $655. GRE fees - $330. Mailing fees - $153. Total: $1,138. Yep. That's over a grand.

I'm sure I've missed some miscellaneous fees. Paper, research materials, etc. But this rough estimation is probably a fairly accurate total. Happily, I can say that I can afford this. I have a great full time job with benefits and I get paid pretty well. The question is, how in the world can anyone else afford this? What about the part-timer? What about the student who just comes out of undergraduate school, with a boatload of loans to pay back? What about the person who's working on a minimum wage without benefits? Great writers come from all walks of life. Yet at an average of $88 a school, it's unfortunate that only the privileged can truly afford to apply to school without sacrificing an arm and a leg. And all of this is, of course, with no guarantee of admission.

The point? I don't really have one, I guess. I wanted to complain, mainly, about the time and effort and money invested into all of this, with the very large possibility of no admission. But then, looking at this extraordinarily large total -- $1,138 -- and then looking at how easily I was able to afford it... the thought makes me thankful.

The List, Part Two

I neglected to mention in my last post that I consider Roosevelt and Columbia College as my backup schools. While I understand there’s no such thing as a “safety” school, I also know that the competition for schools without significant (if any) funding is vastly lower. This is definitely the case for most major metropolitan schools -- schools located in NY, Chicago, and San Francisco -- and as such, one can see that their acceptance rates (taken from Seth Abramson’s Suburban Ecstasies) are much more forgiving, with Columbia College running at about 16%, for example. Why? Major cities have built-in populations from where they can pull potential applicants. In contrast, it’s easy to imagine how schools in tiny towns such as Bloomington, IN or Champaign, IL lack that natural population advantage. To attract talent, small towns have to develop and offer outstanding funding to compensate.

This isn’t necessarily an indictment on the quality of schools in major cities. Columbia College, Roosevelt, and Northwestern’s are fine programs. Yet one can see where the bulk of applications go every year. They follow the money. And why shouldn’t they? As Tom Kealey says, unless you’re independently wealthy, there’s no good reason to go into debt for an MFA degree.

So with that in mind, the rest of my list is heavily based on funding. Of the remaining 11 schools, eight of them provide full or near full funding. The other three provide significant funding (one of them Iowa). Here they are:

Notre Dame
University of Michigan
John Hopkins
Syracuse University
Ohio State University
Washington University (in St. Louis)
University of Illinois
Iowa University
Indiana University
Western Michigan University
Purdue University