What can I say? I like it when my existence is acknowledged found over at metafandom. Very interesting comparison of how Heroes, Castle, and SPN compare in TPTB's relationship to fans/viewers/advertisers.

Hey everyone I'm applying for a MA in international affairs. I would greatly appreciate it if I can get some feedback on my SOP. Thanks in advance! Here is the SOP topic:

• Personal statement - broken into three parts
  1. Please elaborate upon your professional goals and how has your prior employment/volunteer experience helped to prepare you to meet these goals?  Your response should be no more than 400 words.
  2. Describe what you consider to be your most significant past or present contribution to a community.  Your response should be no more than 400 words. 
  3. Please provide any additional information about yourself that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee.  Your response should be no more than 200 words. 

 

( Read more... )

term 18;
sorting period #03
application links.

sorting information;
Ending Date: Sunday, November 15, 2009 @ 9:00PM CST (10:00PM EST)
Section: Application Links
Eligibility: All Hogwarts Elite Members

currently up for sorting;
01. secret_savior; here.
02. rattsu; here.
03. elise_the_great; here.
04. ohcarousel; here.
05. alephz; here.

So I was ALL READY to do Invincible for j2_everafter - had it set at my first choice prompt and EVERYTHING - and then, as I'm sitting there, waiting for the confirmation, THIS catches my eye:

Being the most popular girl in school was easy for Lola Steppe until her mother divorced and moved the family. At the new school, Lola found the role of most popular female was already taken, which meant she had to settle for the role of least popular…or did she? In a full-on battle for the title of most popular, Lola decides to take on Carla Sartini and win the most important thing in the world…or maybe not?


AH HA HA HA HA!! WHO BETTER TO BE TEENAGE DRAMA QUEENS THAN JARED AND JENSEN, I ASK YOU? NO ONE. THAT IS THE ANSWER.

\o/

I am very excited. The end.

So I am applying to graduate programs in english lit but my GRE scores for Verbal are 490; I've taken the test three times now and studied like crazy, but my score has only marginally improved.

I have a GPA of 3.895, three glowing letters of recommendation, what I think is a really really good writing sample and a very defined and thoughtful statement of purpose that all of my recommending profs have told me is excellent. But I am really concerned about my GRE scores because I have heard that schools throw out applications after a certain threshold. I am really concerned because I am already so far into the application process and It is costing me so much money to apply (applying to 8 schools)

Could my GRE scores ruin my chances?

I think this will be the last document I share with the community before finally submitting my applications. If you have the time, please look over my statement. I'm applying to Clinical Psychology PhD programs, and I want to focus on autism. Let me know if there's anything that needs a significant tweaking.

( Thanks for your help! )

Hi all,

This is my first time posting, but I've found this site incredibly useful for working on my statement of purpose. I am applying to policy programs, with a focus on international development. This is the "long word limit version" (1,000 words) of my statement, which I will have to cut down for other schools with shorter limits.

I really appreciate any help you can give me. The prompt for the SOP is:

A personal statement of the applicant's background, goals, academic and professional aspirations, and commitment to public service.

I think a while back sga_flashfic had a Cake or Death challenge. How cool is that?  I read a few of the offerings and they were wonderfully nutty. I'm now wondering whether anyone wrote Rodney asking for cake and getting lemon cake.

I want to watch some SG1 but I haven't been able to get the hardisk from my old computer to work in my new computer. This blows. It blows so badly that I dl and watched SGU. Big mistake. I can take just about everything. I'm not offended that easily but the all the body swapping and body rape in the 1x7 was very hard to swallow. This show is disgusting. What's worse is that even with people pointing out to Mallozi how disgusting it is he doesn't get it and believes that conjugal visits in someone else's body should be just fine and something that people would actually consent to.

I had a good time last night. I was invited wth the bf to the house of some friends of his to watch bad horror movies. When we got there, they were in the middle of The Lost Boys which, inexplicably, the boyfriend had never watched. That film is so slashy. It's kinda hard watching it with non-fandom people but even they are bound to pick up some things. I've seen it a gazillion times but I noticed for the first time that the two brothers have a poster of Rob Lowe in their room. So did I, it was the late 80's after all but I was a girl ffs, what presumably straight teenager and tween boy would have a poster of freaking Rob Lowe? I think the movie is trying to tell us something about Corey Haim's character. And the fashion? The hair! The sunglasses! Still, I think my crush on Kiefer Sutherland in that movie is still holding strong.

The next movie we saw was called Zombie Strippers and starred Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson. It was not p0rn, just gory and had some pretty cool stripping and some hysterically funny scenes. It was bad, of course but the kind of bad that's almost good. Definitely fun. Jameson's face looks kinda plastic but her body is amazing (even though it's kinda plastic too).

I'm working on my statement of purpose right now and fretting over what to include and what kind of narrative and voice to frame it in.

I'm applying to English, Communications, and Film & Media studies programs, many of them hybrids of all three. My interests lie in popular genre texts, particularly horror, and audience reception and fan cultures from the Victorian era to the present. Many of the writers in these areas, or at least those that I enjoy, adopt somewhat of a more reader-friendly tone, most likely by nature of what they're discussing. This tends to be my own writing style - addressing the reader directly, making use of personal experience and interactions with audiences drawn from a lot of ethnographic work.

I'm unsure as to what level of formality is appropriate for my PhD application. I look back over my MA statement of purpose and it reads so stuffy to me; it also comes from when I was applying more to tradionalist Victorian programs, where I'm seeking out a more diverse crowd now to meet my diverse, still developing interests. In particular, I'm concerned with:


1) Are personal narratives acceptable? Is it inappropriate to frame my interests in iterations of family in horror and audience responses in relating my experience as a child being reprimanded for sing-songing the children's rhyme from Nightmare on Elm Street, creating a moment of tension in my divorced family that significantly shaped my ideas of the horror medium as trauma intermediary? Again, Nightmare on Elm Street is the kind of thing I write about, so would it make sense to adopt this approach as representative of the work that I do? Is it too soon or too random-seeming to mention the recent phenomenon of Paranormal Activity as an example of my audience studies and viral marketing?

2) How specific about my research interests and goals should I be? I'm really not certain what I intend to focus on for my dissertation. I'd like to synthesize my interests as much as possible, though as of yet most of my conference papers have focused either on Victorian genres or contemporary fan cultures respectively - should I work to synthesize those in the statement or let my various interests speak to themselves with some thread connecting them? Should I try to outline a dissertation plan or two? I still feel like I'm growing into my interests, and I want to find a place that can help me put them together productively.

Would it be useful, do you think, to set up sort of small paragraphs going through my interests and then tying them together toward the end? ie) Horror, spectatorship, fan production, psychoanalysis and studies of masculinity, all separate and then synthesized in some sort of general statement of my goals as an academic..

3) How detailed should the fit paragraph be? It feels rather rote as I write, inserting a name and a publication or CV line from that person that relates to me, and saying oh it's interesting I'd like to work with them they could help me. It feels very awkward and at once self-serving and ass-kissing (both of which I realize are necessary!).

*

Any tips would be welcome, especially from folks dealing with more media studies-oriented programs and interests in pop culture. The work I do is still academic, and I still want to present that image, but I've always been about accessibility, considering my interests in audiences, and I wonder if that will work for me or against me if I'm too casual/colloquial. I mean, should I even use contractions?

Thanks for the help! I'll undoubtedly be posting my SOP here as it shapes a bit more - some tips as I even write the first draft would be very, very helpful :)