Graduate School of Arts & Sciences : English Department

Other Viewing Options  PDF Download  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. Derek Walcott...  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 MFA 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 MFA 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 semester-length courses may be transferred from other institutions).  Normally, at least three of these courses are taken within the English Department.  However, there is much else to choose from throughout the University (we are the fifth largest private school in the country), including an unusual and active translation center and a University Professors Program that offers a variety of interdisciplinary courses.  < 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 >