Graduate School

About a week ago, I finally got accepted to graduate school. I've been greeting the congratulations with pleased and proud smiles, and the thought of tuition and books with the appropriate amount of trepidation. According to all signs, the real work still lies ahead of me. But that's like standing at the bottom of Everest and waiting to begin the climb. I may not be up the mountain yet, but I've put in a lot of work and taken a long trip just to get this far.

I officially started this journey about eighteen months ago. But on another level, I started it in June of 1996, when I took a job which had nothing whatsoever to do with my original field, working under conditions which sometimes bore more resemblance to life in the Army than they did to the rest of corporate America. I look back on my time at the rat lab, at days of despair and exhaustion, at days of getting up at 5 AM and commuting 90 minutes each way on public transportation to a job where getting sh#t on was a literal and frequent occurrence, and I think, whatever it is, it's not going to be that bad.

But there's bad, and there's bad. The sense of resignation you get when you just don't have the energy to rise above it all is one thing. The sense of frustration and outrage you get when you've actually broken the pattern to take real, focused, effective action and you still get denied, is another. It feels like getting bait-and-switched by the universe.

Which brings me to those last eighteen months.

I was living in Tallahassee, Florida at the time, and I realized that my Great Leap Southward had not so much given me the whole new life I was looking for, as cleaned all the junk out of the old one so I could actually make use of the resources I had. But to take hold of them, I would have to move on again-- back to where I came from. Obstacles overcome: pride, inertia, old dreams, financial hardship, moving in a tropical storm.

I started the application process by identifying schools that I wanted to attend and studying for the GRE test. Obstacles overcome: limited research interest in the field I wanted to study, self-confidence issues at applying to three top schools, math anxiety, learning to apply math skills in a whole new way, learning to write a coherent and error-free essay in 30 minutes.

I had to get three sets of three letters of recommendation, and my only option was to get them from my former employers. Yeah, the ones I'd told that I was done with science. I had to visit in person to start re-cultivating one of them, and field all the questions about whether I was in school yet and why I wasn't in Florida. Then I had to follow up repeatedly to make sure my letters got sent. Obstacles overcome: Pride, self-confidence issues, transportation, re-establishing communication, repeated follow-up.

I took the GRE, did well, wrote my admissions essays, and completed my applications. Then I had to wait. Obstacles overcome: financial hardship (several hundred dollars in fees), writing a professional admissions essay (took weeks!) the waiting game.

I got denied by the first two schools, and took it hard. I called the admissions office of one of them, and spent 45 minutes on the phone discussing my application and what I could have done to improve it. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings, fessing up to the boss about making a 45-minute long-distance call from work, not kicking my best friend out of the house when she said something I didn't want to hear.

I wrote a letter to the third school, with the supplemental information suggested by the admissions advisor I'd called the week before. I waited a long time for the response from that school, then got denied by that one too. Obstacles overcome: discussing my shortcomings again, waiting game again.

I finally applied to the fourth school. They don't have my degree program at all, and I had to apply as a non-degree student. I got in. Obstacles overcome: more pride, resignation, more financial hardship (about $100, but still).

So when you count it all up, I spent about 18 months, a cross-country move, a few thousand dollars, a lot of swallowed pride, a lot of mustered courage, a lot of follow-ups, three denials from graduate schools, and a lot of character-building to get in as a non-degree candidate to my "emergency" school so that I can get enough recent academics to try this all again in six months.

Oh, and one of the things missing from my application, the one that might have turned a denial into an acceptance had I only thought to mention it-- was evidence of sufficient grit.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem for next year.