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Grad school!
Feb. 16th, 2010 01:27 amI think at this point everyone already knows this, between facebook and the rumor mill, but in the interest of standing up for slightly older social media, I feel like I should make an actual LJ post.
I've spent the past few months being kind of useless. I have an unpaid internship, and I briefly worked in a coffee shop, and I've been auditing classes, but basically, I've been sitting around waiting to hear back from all the history PhD programs I applied to. I'm kind of a pessimist, so I've been assuming that the best-case scenario would be that I got into UW, but with no funding, forcing me to choose between giving up on (or at least delaying) grad school and going further into debt as an unfunded student-- at least this time I'd have in-state tuition. So there's been a lot of ups and downs. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a Princeton professor, asking me some questions and saying some nice things about my application. This gave me a brief surge of excitement, followed by worry that I messed up the phone interview. I've spent the past two months counting down the days until March, which is when all the schools promised to respond.
So I was extra-depressed on Monday, when I got my first rejection (from Yale). Rejecting me so early? Clearly they knew right away that they didn't want me! And if it's that clear to them, all the other schools will feel the same! So there were tear, and sulking, and much making of contingency plans. Then on Friday morning, I checked my email and found an email from Princeton. Clearly they were rejecting me too. Except they weren't. They were actually accepting me, with a note saying that they hoped to give me full funding. I'm going to grad school! I spent the first half of Friday overflowing with excitement. There was lots of jumping up and down, some happy-dancing, and in the afternoon, a trip for celebratory crepes. While at the crepe place, I got a call from the UW, also letting me in, also offering me funding. To top it all off, I also won a prize in the East Asian library raffle. I spent the latter half of Friday wandering around in a daze.
It's weird. I spent all of my time at Chicago convinced that I was stupid and lazy, hating academia. I left the U of C promising never to return to school, unless I was going back to study law or medicine or something practical. Then Jyn and Ben and my dad convinced me to apply for an MA, and I somehow ended up getting a scholarship to pay for it. Once I talked to a doctor and started taking ritalin, I started liking school a lot more, and in the fall of my second year, I suddenly realized that I liked studying history so much that I wanted to keep studying it, and my professor was encouraging, and now it seems like I'll be going to back to grad school. I'm super-happy! But I still can't quite believe it...
But still! Yay! Grad school!
I've spent the past few months being kind of useless. I have an unpaid internship, and I briefly worked in a coffee shop, and I've been auditing classes, but basically, I've been sitting around waiting to hear back from all the history PhD programs I applied to. I'm kind of a pessimist, so I've been assuming that the best-case scenario would be that I got into UW, but with no funding, forcing me to choose between giving up on (or at least delaying) grad school and going further into debt as an unfunded student-- at least this time I'd have in-state tuition. So there's been a lot of ups and downs. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a Princeton professor, asking me some questions and saying some nice things about my application. This gave me a brief surge of excitement, followed by worry that I messed up the phone interview. I've spent the past two months counting down the days until March, which is when all the schools promised to respond.
So I was extra-depressed on Monday, when I got my first rejection (from Yale). Rejecting me so early? Clearly they knew right away that they didn't want me! And if it's that clear to them, all the other schools will feel the same! So there were tear, and sulking, and much making of contingency plans. Then on Friday morning, I checked my email and found an email from Princeton. Clearly they were rejecting me too. Except they weren't. They were actually accepting me, with a note saying that they hoped to give me full funding. I'm going to grad school! I spent the first half of Friday overflowing with excitement. There was lots of jumping up and down, some happy-dancing, and in the afternoon, a trip for celebratory crepes. While at the crepe place, I got a call from the UW, also letting me in, also offering me funding. To top it all off, I also won a prize in the East Asian library raffle. I spent the latter half of Friday wandering around in a daze.
It's weird. I spent all of my time at Chicago convinced that I was stupid and lazy, hating academia. I left the U of C promising never to return to school, unless I was going back to study law or medicine or something practical. Then Jyn and Ben and my dad convinced me to apply for an MA, and I somehow ended up getting a scholarship to pay for it. Once I talked to a doctor and started taking ritalin, I started liking school a lot more, and in the fall of my second year, I suddenly realized that I liked studying history so much that I wanted to keep studying it, and my professor was encouraging, and now it seems like I'll be going to back to grad school. I'm super-happy! But I still can't quite believe it...
But still! Yay! Grad school!