Graduate School of Arts & Sciences : English Department

Other Viewing Options  Single page layout Letter from the Director  1. Thank you for...  2. Thus, at any given...  3. Financial Aid...  4. Admissions Materials...  5. Since we need...  6. All the above is...  7. Robert Pinsky...  8. Ha Jin, our former...  9. What else?...  10. We are happy to...  11. What can you expect...  12. Over the last decade... < 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 > Thank you for asking about our writing program. I'll try in what follows to give you some idea of the way we work and respond to the questions most often posed by applicants. As you probably know, we are a small, intensive one-year M.F.A. program. Each entering class has no more than twelve fiction writers, twelve poets, and up to six playwrights; hence, no workshop will have more than a dozen fully enrolled students, indeed, in recent years, we have been aiming for classes of no larger than ten. The standards for admission are high, since we draw from a pool of over four hundred applicants each year. The course of study is, as you might imagine, a full one. For the M.F.A. in creative writing, a student must complete eight classes--at least half of them in the workshops, with the remaining courses coming from the graduate curriculum within Boston University (though up to two courses may be transferred from other institutions). These courses may come from among the vast offerings of what is, after all the fifth-largest private university in the country—from the English Department, or any other department that offers courses that are essentially literary in nature, including the superb Translation Seminar in the Romance Studies Department. < 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 >