CelticBear’s Musings

Got my Fall ’06 grades in today… A’s, baby! All A’s! Well, I only had two classes, so… both A’s! *glee*

I had “ENG598: Early English Language & Literature“, which mainly focused on medieval cycle, miracle, and morality plays; and “ENG600: Problems and Methods of Research in English (and Theory)” which was a tough class! But, and extremely useful and necessary class! In my 5th or 6th tier undergrad college I’d never even encountered the concept of “theory.” Come to find out, theory, or methodology is absolutely vital in graduate and professional work. Theory is barely approached at my current 4th tier university because progress trickles slowly from the top, but if you look at the job descriptions for 1st through 3rd tier universities (from Princeton to University of Chicago, McGill to Penn State, etc.) most every faculty opening in English departments (which are slowly being changed to cultural and media departments,) require some focus in theory. Whether it’s Marxist or feminist or post-structuralist or “queer theory” or post-modern or eco-theory, etc. Theory is everything, and you can’t say anything important without applying theory or method.

Between that and learning about problems and methods in research, and the mountains and mountains of information regarding current trends in academia and cultural study, I’d be at a ridiculous disadvantage trying to get into PhD programs much less find a good job at a tier 1 through 3 university. It’s because of this class that I’m going to be presenting a paper at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale in March, and I may possibly have a scholarly book review published in a refereed journal (that one is still a big maybe, but I’m hopeful.) Those two events (which hopefully won’t be my only two conferences and potential book reviews during my MFA!) and getting an actual article published will increase my chances of getting into a good PhD program a hundred-fold. Being published and presented, in multiple ways and times, are more impressive to PhD review boards than a 4.0 GPA which are dimes-a-dozen (and I’m on my way to having *grin*) or good GRE’s (which I do have *grin*).

Next semester I’m taking “ENG500: Advanced Writing: Non-Fiction” and “ENG693: Social History of English Words“. Those should be really interesting! My text for ENG693 is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Wow! Impressive book! I’d love to have that book regardless of being for a class.

Oh yeah, I was going to say something about positivism. Not the philosophy, but being positive. *g*

It’s come to my attention that me excessive criticism and cynicism and ire toward certain topics and people has become rather excessive and potentially emotionally harmful. I’m going to make a promise… hey! a New Year’s Resolution even, to be more positive and focus more on the “good stuff.” For example, I trash religion incessantly, but I never say anything positive about non-dogmatic faith. Which, actually, I’m still trying to get a handle on when faith becomes a belief in something religious as opposed to something personally “spiritual”, for lack of a better word.

It’s still going to be very hard for me to avoid trashing our current administration every time they do something immoral, illegal, unconscionable–but I’ll try.

Update:

Because I like to brag, *eg* here are my GRE’s. =)

GRE March 2006 Score Percentage
Verbal                  670         94
Quantitative         610         48
Analytical             055         86

That Verbal 670 is good enough for admittance into even Harvard and Princeton! But that Quant’ 610 sucks eggs. Fortunately that only needs to be better than 500, if looked at at all, for English Graduate programs.
I may still need to take the English specific GRE component for some PhD programs. Where I’ll basically need to have memorized the latest Norton Anthology. *snarky smirk* I wasn’t that great on names, dates, and titles when I was an undergrad, and that was 10 years ago!