I'm having grad school issues
So the past few days at work have been crappy, a fact which reinforces my life-goal of not being a waitress. Today, I came home wanting to either a) go for a run, or b) drink a bottle of red wine by myself, neither of which was very conducive to my plan to go to the gym this evening. So instead, I sat here at my computer and started a defiant "I want to make something of myself" search for grad schools.
Here's the problem. I don't really know where I want to go or what I want to study. I started with my fantasy schools, the ones that whose undergraduate programs were my top choices, that is until they rejected me: Columbia and Brown.
Columbia has a great school of journalism. I know this because my high school staff went there for a convention once, and it was awesome. However, this great school of journalism sounds frickin' hard, both to get into and to survive. They want applicants to have well-versed degrees, to have taken courses in things like political science and psychology, which, frankly, I didn't. They make you take a test both on your ability to write a news story/editorial, and your ability to identify people as diverse as Karl Rove and Eminem. Then, assuming I could actually get in, they'd probably make me take classes in all that horrible news and editorial stuff, when really my shy little ass just wants to write editorials and features. They also recommend that their full-time students don't bother trying to have jobs.
Brown, on the other hand, has no school of journalism, but they do have an MFA in Literary Arts. The problem with this, aside from the fact that such an MFA will end up being just as logically useless as my current BA, is that they want you to pick a discipline. Fiction OR poetry OR playwriting OR... I think it was electronic writing? So like, blogging? I'm not prepared to make such an executive decision. I like all of it.
Then I googled "MFA in Literature" and came up with American University's program, which doesn't force you to pick a discipline, and offers many writing workshops, literature classes, and visits from professional writers. So in other words, it's CCS: Washington, DC. And Washington, DC, much like New York and Providence, is not in California.
So I refined my google to "MFA in Literature, California", and found out that UCI (where my brother goes) has a program in Fiction and a program in Poetry, although you can apply to both. The program in Fiction admits 6 new students every year; the program in Poetry admits 4-6 students. Let's just say I don't trust my chances.
I also found California College of the Arts (in San Francisco, which I suppose technically counts as the California I was looking for. They also seem to have this idea of a focus genre, though they do encourage some diversion. A plus of this one is that the faculty totally includes an actual "Professor Laskey."
Ok, so before I hyperventilate over this any more, let it be said that I don't even know for sure if I want to go to grad school. It would, for all intents and purposes, involve moving yet again. It would probably conveniently slot into the two years between marriage and babies, and then once there are babies, what sort of a career am I going to pretend to have? Maybe being a housewife isn't quite as bad as being a waitress? The real problem is that I just don't know what I want to do with my life, but if I don't start getting some recognition/gratification as a writer soon, I'm going to feel like I'm wasting it.
Here's the problem. I don't really know where I want to go or what I want to study. I started with my fantasy schools, the ones that whose undergraduate programs were my top choices, that is until they rejected me: Columbia and Brown.
Columbia has a great school of journalism. I know this because my high school staff went there for a convention once, and it was awesome. However, this great school of journalism sounds frickin' hard, both to get into and to survive. They want applicants to have well-versed degrees, to have taken courses in things like political science and psychology, which, frankly, I didn't. They make you take a test both on your ability to write a news story/editorial, and your ability to identify people as diverse as Karl Rove and Eminem. Then, assuming I could actually get in, they'd probably make me take classes in all that horrible news and editorial stuff, when really my shy little ass just wants to write editorials and features. They also recommend that their full-time students don't bother trying to have jobs.
Brown, on the other hand, has no school of journalism, but they do have an MFA in Literary Arts. The problem with this, aside from the fact that such an MFA will end up being just as logically useless as my current BA, is that they want you to pick a discipline. Fiction OR poetry OR playwriting OR... I think it was electronic writing? So like, blogging? I'm not prepared to make such an executive decision. I like all of it.
Then I googled "MFA in Literature" and came up with American University's program, which doesn't force you to pick a discipline, and offers many writing workshops, literature classes, and visits from professional writers. So in other words, it's CCS: Washington, DC. And Washington, DC, much like New York and Providence, is not in California.
So I refined my google to "MFA in Literature, California", and found out that UCI (where my brother goes) has a program in Fiction and a program in Poetry, although you can apply to both. The program in Fiction admits 6 new students every year; the program in Poetry admits 4-6 students. Let's just say I don't trust my chances.
I also found California College of the Arts (in San Francisco, which I suppose technically counts as the California I was looking for. They also seem to have this idea of a focus genre, though they do encourage some diversion. A plus of this one is that the faculty totally includes an actual "Professor Laskey."
Ok, so before I hyperventilate over this any more, let it be said that I don't even know for sure if I want to go to grad school. It would, for all intents and purposes, involve moving yet again. It would probably conveniently slot into the two years between marriage and babies, and then once there are babies, what sort of a career am I going to pretend to have? Maybe being a housewife isn't quite as bad as being a waitress? The real problem is that I just don't know what I want to do with my life, but if I don't start getting some recognition/gratification as a writer soon, I'm going to feel like I'm wasting it.