Selecting a School
How do you select a school and a program?
The Literature, Language, and Culture Program offers the following sound advice to anyone selecting a graduate program:
If your undergraduate work was narrowly focused or not exceptionally strong, consider an M.A. program.
If you are not sure of your eventual area of concentration, consider large programs with prominent faculty in several areas. Changing graduate schools is expensive in time and money.
Talk to your present professors about your interests and get their ideas about graduate schools, particularly if you are thinking about going to a school from which one of them graduated.
Think about works of secondary scholarship that most impressed you in your undergraduate courses: you might consider the universities where the professors who wrote those works teach.
Research the faculty at various universities. A great source for such information is English Department Home Pages Worldwide, a site maintained by NYU professor David Hoover (assisted by Natalie Moreira). This site links to the homepages of every English Department in the world. Many departments provide information (often on the individual faculty member’s homepage) about their faculty’s teaching and publication. If the information is inadequate, check the publication of the faculty members you are most interested in with the MLA Bibliography.
Research the rankings and specialties of graduate programs. There is no standard guide here, but Jack Gourman’s The Gourman Report: A Rating of Graduate and Professional Programs in American and International Universities is as good as any.
If at all possible, try to visit the department and campus. Talk to the faculty in your specialty and to the graduate students. Check the library. Check potential housing. You could be living here for ten years or more.
What if I'm looking for a specific program? Is there a source that can tell me which schools offer which programs?
The best source for such information is a professor in the particular area or subject in which you're interested. For example, if you want to study medieval literature, you should ask your medieval lit professor for recommendations. Post-modern lit? Your post-modern lit professor. Creative writing? Professional writing? You get the picture. That's why the LLC Program's third piece of advice is so crucial!
If you want to do some browsing on your own, a basic (if incomplete) online source is GradSchools.com, which bills itself as the "most comprehensive online source of graduate school information." Visit this site, and you can search a wide variety of categories, from Agricultural, Animal, and Food Sciences to Theology and Religious Studies (sorry, no Zs available!).
Search the pull-down menu for Liberal Arts programs, and you'll find another wide variety of offerings, including Creative Writing, English Language and Literature, Journalism, and Professional Writing and Rhetoric. Once you've narrowed your search by subject, you can then search by region (eastern US vs. western US, even outside the US), then browse the listing of featured schools. The site tells you which programs are offered (MA, MFA, PhD), provides a brief description of the program, and also lets you link to the school's own pages. Additionally, you can directly request info about a program from the school itself.
What this site doesn't do: (1) provide a comprehensive list of schools and programs and (2) rank the programs. For #2, which is important, you'll need to do more searching.
Is this the only site on the web? No, it isn't. But it's a start.
Is there a more specific way I can narrow my searching? What if I want to find a school where I can cover 80% or more of my expenses? Or a school in a moderate sized city?
The Princeton Review's Grad School and Careers site has two neat features: (1) an advanced grad school search that helps you find programs that match your specific needs and (2) a career quiz that lets you zero on in your specific goals. Of course, at a certain point, you're going to be asked to pay for advanced services, but you can get some insight into potential programs and careers without plunking down any cash (or swiping the plastic). Taking the career quiz can be interesting!
Can I find grad program rankings online?
Yes. One such site is U.S. News and World Report's annual ranking of best graduate schools. This site offers you basic information about the best programs in a variety of areas. For example, if you check out the Social Sciences and Humanities link and scroll down to the English section, you can check out rankings by subject. Who has the "best" programs in African-American Literature? in Medieval/Renaissance Literature? in Gender and Literature?
This is a free service, and perhaps a bit subjective, of course. (Can anyone say "Ivy League"??) If you want more info, you can pay for the "premium online edition" of the service, get yourself a hard copy, or spring for both.