Asking for advice
Hi, guys. I've been having a pretty bad day, and I'm starting to wonder if I should even bother applying to grad school if I don't think I'm going to get in (why not just save the money from the app fees and buy books or something?) so I was wondering what your thoughts were.
So I graduated from college after 3 years (good because it saved me money, bad because it didn't give me as much time as I needed to really bounce back from some bad grades) in May of '07. My final GPA was a 2.972, my major GPA was 3.628, and my upper-level course GPA was 3.02 (basically, I had Issues, including clinical depression, but because of the damn horrible depression I never got myself out of bed and to an expert to get myself officially diagnosed because I was an IDIOT even though I know that's what it was). I took the GRE in fall of '07 and got 670V, 730Q, and 5.0W (no idea why the math was better).
I worked on and off for awhile (nowhere reputable or connected to what I want to study), then in spring '09 I took courses at a local community college and got straight As (12 credits). I'm now taking courses at a university that has nothing in the way of what I want to do in grad school (South Asian Studies/Film Studies...basically studying Bollywood movies the way that other people study Hollywood or French or other movies) and I've actually never taken a course on it because the place I got my BA from did have South Asian Studies, but the emphasis was on art/history/politics/anything but films.
I'm also only applying to three schools because none of the others on my shortlist had faculty or courses about the specific area I want to go into, so that doesn't give me many chances. (And one of those is a special program that's not totally related to what I really want to study but that looks like it'll be good for me to segue into a potential PhD at a later date.)
I've got almost nothing to put on a CV. I've got no recommenders who can speak to the skills I will specifically utilize if I do get into a program. (As a related question, if I do apply which professor from the community college do you think it would be better to ask [both have PhDs and both gave me an A for their course] Professor A, who taught Asian Literature [literature is kind of like film] and who liked me okay, or Professor B, who taught Linguistics [I wrote a paper on Sanskrit for the final project, which has nothing to do with film] and who loved me, copied with my permission many of my papers to use as awesome examples for his next classes, and who told me to be sure to come back and visit?)
So what do you think? Any hope?
Sorry for all the rambling. I've just gotten myself really worked up about all this.
So I graduated from college after 3 years (good because it saved me money, bad because it didn't give me as much time as I needed to really bounce back from some bad grades) in May of '07. My final GPA was a 2.972, my major GPA was 3.628, and my upper-level course GPA was 3.02 (basically, I had Issues, including clinical depression, but because of the damn horrible depression I never got myself out of bed and to an expert to get myself officially diagnosed because I was an IDIOT even though I know that's what it was). I took the GRE in fall of '07 and got 670V, 730Q, and 5.0W (no idea why the math was better).
I worked on and off for awhile (nowhere reputable or connected to what I want to study), then in spring '09 I took courses at a local community college and got straight As (12 credits). I'm now taking courses at a university that has nothing in the way of what I want to do in grad school (South Asian Studies/Film Studies...basically studying Bollywood movies the way that other people study Hollywood or French or other movies) and I've actually never taken a course on it because the place I got my BA from did have South Asian Studies, but the emphasis was on art/history/politics/anything but films.
I'm also only applying to three schools because none of the others on my shortlist had faculty or courses about the specific area I want to go into, so that doesn't give me many chances. (And one of those is a special program that's not totally related to what I really want to study but that looks like it'll be good for me to segue into a potential PhD at a later date.)
I've got almost nothing to put on a CV. I've got no recommenders who can speak to the skills I will specifically utilize if I do get into a program. (As a related question, if I do apply which professor from the community college do you think it would be better to ask [both have PhDs and both gave me an A for their course] Professor A, who taught Asian Literature [literature is kind of like film] and who liked me okay, or Professor B, who taught Linguistics [I wrote a paper on Sanskrit for the final project, which has nothing to do with film] and who loved me, copied with my permission many of my papers to use as awesome examples for his next classes, and who told me to be sure to come back and visit?)
So what do you think? Any hope?
Sorry for all the rambling. I've just gotten myself really worked up about all this.