So April 15th has come and gone, and the MFA application season is finally over (sort of). Four days ago I sent in my $250 deposit to accept my slot in fiction at UMass Boston. My final list of schools:

• Rejected:
  • UMass Amherst
  • Indiana
  • Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Wisconsin, Madison
  • Iowa Writer’s Workshop
  • Michener Center (Texas, Austin)
  • Cornell
  • Brown
• Never heard back from:
  • Virginia
  • Boston University
• Admitted:
  • UMass Boston
  • UNH

So what happened this application season?

Well, I spent a lot of money, I applied to a lot of schools, of which I only got in to the lower ranked ones.  But I did end up getting offered a funded assistantship by UMB, which was mostly a matter of luck.

So it seems like my strategy (to apply primarily to top ranked schools nationwide, but only use nearby, regional schools as “safeties”) was a success, as far as that goes.

With all that in mind, here is my advice to future applicants.

1. Use the resources that are out there.
   Familiarity with the MFA Blog and Seth’s lists for funding and selectivity is worth a lot to your applications. (Just remember that Seth is awesome and does amazing work for the MFA community, but is still a little crazy.)
2. Your admissions will be more correlated than you think.
   One of the big refrains among MFA applicants is how “random” the whole process is. I really hate this idea, since it implies that MFA professors use the time-honored “throwing applications down the stairs” method. While it is true that there can be differences of opinions between application readers at different schools, they agree significantly more often than not. Just based on looking at everyone’s final lists, I’d say there’s something like a 60-70% correlation between admissions. That means that if you got into one school, with a given ranking and selectivity, you’d have about a 60-70% chance of getting into another school with identical ranking and selectivity. You’ll see from my list that my admissions are entirely rankings-contiguous, since there’s a relatively wide spread in terms of selectivity between the top-ranked schools I applied to and the lower ranked ones. This fact is also important because it reveals a central flaw in my strategy. Going into the process, I had this idea in the back of my mind that, just because I was applying to so many of the top schools, I would have to get in to at least one of them. Clearly this didn’t happen, and I might have been better served by only applying to a couple of the top schools and saving a few hundred dollars.
3. If you want to go to an MFA program, you can, as long as you are capable of writing an English sentence.
   I feel like this point doesn’t get emphasized enough. Basically, if you do some research, think for even an iota about your writing, and are willing to apply to a fair number of schools, you can get accepted to an MFA program. There is no challenge to it. The only questions are how good of a cohort you want to study with, how much funding you’d like to get, and where you’d like to study.This fact, of course, only contributes to the whole problem about the essential worthlessness of the MFA. But it should also be heartening for people who want to have the MFA experience, doing a lot of writing and hence improving their writing, and who also have at least $50,000 stashed in their back pockets.

So that’s it for my analysis. Starting this fall I’ll be posting updates, stories, and chatter from the insular world of MFAitude.