I can't go on, I'll go on

... writes Samuel Beckett in The Unnameable.

The main narrative of this week has been about budget cuts. A succession of emails from our Director of Graduate Studies warned that they were dramatically cutting the budget for the English Graduate Program. Speculation ran all the way from admitting no PhD candidates to the program for 2010 to admitting only current MA students to the PhD program.

In the year I was admitted, I believe there were between 300 and 400 applications for both programs. I began with about 30 other MA students and between 12-15 PhD students. This year, they admitted only 6 PhD students, and there are around 15 MA students starting out in the program. The final decision going forward is that they will admit 6 PhDs and 6 MAs for 2010 and 2011. This means that my chances of being admitted as a PhD student are even slimmer than I thought, and that if I am accepted, I will have a much smaller selection of course offerings to choose from as a PhD student.

To compound the problem, more than six of my MA classmates are applying for the PhD. Some of them I like and respect very much. It's hard enough to know that I'm competing with hundreds of people for only a few spots, but it is especially difficult to be in such fierce competition with people whose ideas have helped foster my own.

I know there are real problems in the world, and that whether I get the opportunity to become a PhD student is not one of them. But I have already put so much time and effort into preparing myself to apply that I first felt like throwing up my hands and throwing in the towel. To say that it will be nearly impossible to get in is not really an overstatement. My DGS offered this suggestion: "I urge you all to cast your nets widely in terms of looking for fellowship support and/or applying to PhD programs." But I don't have a net. I have a basket, and all my eggs are in it.

The only thing I ever quit because it was too hard was calculus. But this isn't calculus, and it would be a lot easier to live with not getting in than not even trying. So I have no choice but to do what I planned to do from the beginning: Assemble the best application I can, submit it, and hope for the best. If I'm going to put all my eggs in one basket, I have to make it the best basket I can. Must get back to get weaving.