How to Approach this Application
Dear Applicant,
As you prepare your application to the Buffalo English Graduate Program, you may want to know something about how we make decisions and what we look for in an applicant. First let me tell you how our admissions process operates. Our procedures are both rigorous and democratic. We have an Admissions Committee consisting of ten people, five faculty members and five graduate students, each with a full voice and an equal vote.
The Committee reads every application folder, then discusses them at long and contentious meetings. Mostly we find ourselves discussing the personal statements, the writing sample, and the letters of recommendation. While we do gauge grades and GREs, we are not number driven and we trust our judgments. We have accepted candidates with modest GREs and have rejected candidates with stratospheric scores. Furthermore, we do not place any particular emphasis on the schools you have attended. It is not the prestige of a school that produces interesting applicants. Brilliant students dwell in strange or obscure places, and they interest us.
Here are some specific suggestions for you to consider as you complete your application:
1. Letters of Recommendation. If possible, it is often a good idea to have a professor or neutral third party review your letters of recommendation. This is mainly an option for applicants who are working through a Planning and Placement Center at their current institution, where letters of recommendation are first collected before being forwarded to various graduate programs.
2. The Personal Statement. This is a very important part of the application and therefore it is worth spending a considerable amount of time conceptualizing, revising and proofreading it. The statement should also be reviewed by someone who is a good editor and (ideally) familiar with the protocols of the genre. It is the first document we read and the first indication we have of who you are. Typical statements weigh in at about 2-3 typed, double-spaced pages.
We recommend that your statement address three points. First, it should give us an indication of what you will pursue at the graduate level in terms of field. This can be articulated in the form of theoretical inquiry, methodological approach, specific authors, historical period (i.e. contemporary U.S. multicultural literature, Victorian, Medieval, Renaissance), and/or genre. There are also many other modes of intellectual specification, such as Cultural Studies, World Literature, Anglophone Caribbean fiction, etc. Second, the statement should explain to the committee the reasons for your choice of field. Why pursue your intellectual interests at a graduate level? If you do not have a specific project in mind, then give us a sense of the questions that you will ask and why they are important. You can take this opportunity to explain how you became interested in pursuing a graduate degree and/or your interest in the specific field. Third, the statement should also answer the question: why the Buffalo English Department? What resources (human or otherwise) and programs do we offer that would help develop your intellectual interests?
Let me add that your statement does not commit you to a specific project if you are admitted. You can arrive wanting to study the black nationalist poetics of Gwendolyn Brooks, and then decide after three years of coursework that you would prefer to write about the eco-politics of Thoreau. It is entirely up to you. The objective of the statement of purpose is to demonstrate to the committee that you can define intellectual parameters of inquiry and articulate a field of study (though not necessarily a specific project). Avoid lengthy autobiographical and anecdotal details about how you came to love literature. Such general statements are a disadvantage in an increasingly competitive applicant pool.
Results of the GRE general aptitude test. Please note that in order to be eligible for nomination for additional fellowship support from the College of Arts and Sciences, you need to achieve a combined score on the Verbal & Quantitative sections of the GRE of 1270. We accept, but do not require, the results of the advanced test in English.
