Reminiscence: Off to Grad School

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1

When I entered a large Midwestern university in 1960, I was convinced I wouldn’t go on to Graduate School. My father had an advanced degree and I respected him very much, but I wasn’t going down that path. I was going to be a writer, an ambition I didn’t really give up until much later.

I said to myself – and probably to a few close friends – that after college, I was going to live and work in New York City. That was the place for me, and if I had to work as a dishwasher in order to follow my dream, well, that’s what I would do. (Even at 18 it never occurred to me that I would ever find myself unable to get a job, and I never really believed my job would be unskilled labor… but I was ready, if it came to that.)

2

I did well in college. I liked learning all that stuff. Studying for Final Exams was actually one of my favorite parts! But even as I moved along in my senior year, I remained convinced that graduate school was not in my future. I was going to find a simple job – maybe in NYC, maybe not – and do my real work, writing, on the side… if I had to.

But as the Honors Seminar in my major moved into the Spring semester – okay, it was English – as all my Honor colleagues talked about their graduate school ambitions, it began to dawn on me that if I could get paid for it, doing graduate work would be less demanding than many other jobs, and I could still do my writing on the side. (This incidentally later turned out to be true.)

There were two good options for earning a living in graduate school (working full-time and going to grad school on the side, of course, which was not a good option since I would have no time to write). I could support myself and write on the side if I could get a fellowship that provided tuition, room, and board, or, less attractively, I could make it work if I could be hired as a graduate teaching assistant.

Everyone seemed to think I could basically write my own ticket, the really hard part being choosing where to apply. After all, I was going to graduate with honors, Phi Beta Kappa, with a Certificate of Merit, and Summa Cum Laude… Why worry?

So I applied for full fellowships at Harvard and Yale in English, at UCLA and USC in Cinematography (since I had been a film buff for years and wanted a creative career after all), at my own university for a full fellowship in Comparative Literature (since I had completed my junior year in Paris), and – in case all else failed – as an English teaching assistant at the Texas university where my Dad had taught (not English) for many years. Dad had said that the English Department hired a slew of TAs since the required two freshman composition courses were taught entirely by graduate students.

If my faculty advisors – I had gathered three or four by this time – expressed any interest in what I was hoping to do, none of them questioned my approach at all. I sent in all the required application materials, on time, and waited to see which among my offers would be the most attractive.

3

The grad school application deadline passed, and the results began to come in. I wasn’t even accepted into graduate school at Yale or Harvard. They apparently already had enough students from the Midwest. UCLA said it was doubtful they would have a fellowship available that year, and – as a new and relatively small department - they did not hire graduate assistants. USC actually offered me a fellowship worth a lot of money, but it only covered tuition. A big surprise was that my Dad’s university was suffering significant financial difficulties, and the English Department would be fortunate if they could keep employed the TAs they already had on the payroll who were only part-way through their graduate programs.

All my friends in the Honors Seminar, not knowing I had applied for the Comparative Literature fellowship, were dumbfounded to learn that a young woman whom we all regarded as fourth or fifth out of the twelve of us – in knowledge, insight, self-confidence, and creativity – had applied for and received the Comp Lit award.

When I asked one of my advisors if he knew why she had been selected instead of… well, I don’t know… me, he said, “Well, everyone knows that you’re going to California to study cinematography.”

4

Now that I had begun thinking that grad school was a better option for me than washing dishes in New York City, it was looking like dish-washing was my only possible career path!

When I sought advice from another faculty member, he said I should write all the big state universities I could think of, explain the situation, and see if they would offer me a TAship despite its being past the application deadlne. At my own university, they had awarded all the TAships they expected to have but my name would go on their back-up list in case...

I spent days and nights typing letters and resumes on my little Royal portable. I eventually sent out over thirty late applications. The Department Chair at the University of Illinois actually called to express his sympathy for the pickle I was in and to say they too had awarded all the positions they could afford in April, so long before they knew the size of the entering freshman class. But he went on to say that every year, they added a few TAs after freshman registration, so he was confident something would come along for me even though he couldn’t absolutely guarantee it. I really appreciated the straight talk, and I know now that it’s a near sure-thing that I could have gone ahead as though I had actually been hired.

One by one, these big universities wrote more or less the same thing: they couldn’t hire me yet but almost always had open positions at the last minute. Could they enroll me as a grad student now, hoping for the best?

5

As I mulled over my uncertain options, one of my Honor Seminar colleagues came into class one day and said he had a dilemma and wondered what the rest of us would advise him to do. F----- explained that he had been offered a graduate teaching assistantship at a fairly large private university in the Northeast, and he had also been offered a full fellowship in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was actually undecided which offer to accept, perhaps because he was originally from the Northeast. Anyway, seeing how unanimous and animated our advice to him had been, he announced at the end of that day’s class that he was going to accept the Chicago offer.

Here was my chance! I asked F----- not to respond to the private university in the Northeast for three days, and I went right home and wrote to the Department Chair saying, “My friend F---- is going to turn down your generous offer of an assistantship… Why don’t you hire me instead?"

It seemed like it was by return mail that Dr. E----- sent me a contract. In the Fall when I arrived and went by to thank him, he seemed glad to see me and mentioned that they had never received one of the several recommendations for me that they needed. When I said that without delay I would call the professor in question – could it be the one who told me I was going to California? – Dr. E----- - whom I had never met before - said: “Oh, don’t worry. I wrote you a recommendation myself!”

[to be continued]

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