My Experience Getting into No Graduate Programs

April 8, 2022

In recent memory, I have:

• left my wallet on bus
• left my phone on a different bus
• left my wallet at a highway rest stop
• lost my car keys on campus
• lost my phone on a mountain while skiing
• lost my phone while hiking
• lost my phone on a walk (three times)

(I recovered the lost item in all instances.)

All this to say: it is shocking that I do not have a horror story about getting locked out. But in college, on two separate occasions more than two years apart, my roommates locked themselves out of their bedrooms. They had both left their rooms to shower in shared bathrooms, only to discover their predicaments on the way back (wearing only towels).

The first time it happened, I was subletting a room in my friends’ off-campus house, supposedly studying for the GRE. I convinced my friend to call a locksmith, so she Googled one. We accidentally called a locksmith dispatch that sent multiple locksmiths to our location. A flood of phone calls from locksmiths arrived. We could not stop them. We did not know how many locksmiths were coming or when they would arrive. What if multiple locksmiths showed up at the same time? We like joking about the “locksmith dispatch” now, but it was a bit terrifying to be two girls home alone with no control over an unknown quantity of men headed in their direction, possibly expecting payment. After calling the dispatch back to stop the onslaught of locksmiths (thankfully before any arrived), my friend called her dad, who brought a ladder and climbed through the locked bedroom’s window.

The second time it happened, the GRE was long over. I was living in a house with five members of a sorority I was not part of. My fellow locksmith dispatch victim had graduated along with the rest of our friends. One morning, my roommate woke up early for an orgo exam, took a shower, and realized that her clothes and car keys were trapped in her bedroom. She was home alone. She found a pair of tweezers in the bathroom, and I came home later that day to find her doorknob dismantled and laying on the floor.

These two events really book-ended my graduate school application process. In the summer of 2018, I scheduled my GRE on the day before I was meant to leave for a 12-week research opportunity in Hong Kong. I stayed at Rutgers, living in a house with my best friends for four weeks, a period I had deemed my “intensive GRE boot camp,” but was really just an excuse not to go home. The GRE came and went. I came back from Hong Kong and was in Montreal with my friends 24 hours later, with plans to make the most of our final year at Rutgers. Then came the start of senior fall, which was defined by lengthy applications to fellowships I didn’t get and a thousand dollars spent applying to PhD programs that I didn’t get into. I remember tweeting ETS and asking if they did gift cards. Let's pretend they deactivated their corporate Twitter account because of me.

In late March of 2019, after receiving no interview requests for PhD programs, I checked my spam folder and realized I had been waitlisted at Johns Hopkins. April began to tick by. I cannot liken this experience to anything except waiting for a stay-of-execution phone call. At 9pm on April 15, 2019, I received an email informing me that Hopkins did not have a spot to offer me. This is what the following year looked like for me:

• April 16: Wallowing.

• April 17 – May 2: I apply for a handful of jobs. I am offered a somewhat predatory AmeriCorps fellowship teaching at a charter school in Newark, but I think, “I can do this for a year.”

• May 3: I have a strategy meeting with a research mentor, Katherine St. John of Hunter College in NYC, who offers me a research position for the following academic year. However, the offer is contingent on me maintaining student status. I think about how I’m four courses short of a Computer Science major.

• May 13: Senior week at Rutgers begins. I take part with my closest college friends.

• May 14: I meet with a dean at Rutgers asking if I can “cancel” my graduation. She tells me I have to graduate.

• May 15: Dean at Rutgers realizes I am a transfer student and lets me stay. I withdraw my request to graduate.

• May 19: My friends walk at Rutgers University’s 2019 commencement. My name is in the program listed as the winner of a senior thesis award. I am on a flight to Paris that I booked in protest against walking (scanning a QR code before scurrying across a stage as my name is flashed on a jumbotron in a sweltering football stadium, just so my mom can take an extremely zoomed in picture of me indistinguishable from CCTV footage). In hindsight, my stubbornness here was a good thing.

• May – early June: I eschew the Paris metro on my trip and decide to walk everywhere within a 4 mile radius of the 19th Arrondissement (where I am staying). I visit the catacombs and admire the macabre arts and crafts that the tomb workers did (bones placed in patterns, stacked into sculptures). I eat uncountably many baguettes.

• mid-June – August: I participate in RIPS LA at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. It is an incredible experience that warrants its own blog post. I hate LA as a city, but will later get nostalgic for it, like high school.

• September – December: I move into a pseudo-sorority house. My college friends visit to celebrate my birthday, to join my team for trivia night, to pick me up from Urgent Care and babysit me after I suffer an asthma attack. I visit them at their new apartments in the city. I am only in class part time and I have already completed my thesis, so I rejoin the gymnastics club and make new friends.

• December 11: Following my last class of the semester, I head to the city to stay with a friend who is working from Facebook’s NYC office that week. I visit the office, with its unlimited snacks and vending machines full of tech accessories but devoid of any payment systems. I am faced with a pretty compelling argument for not going to graduate school. We go to a bar with a mechanical bull because it has a mechanical bull, and I am devastated to learn the bull is temporarily out of operation.

• December 12: I begin resubmitting PhD applications. I yell that “I will pass away if I have to ‘Click here to add new work experience’ one more time.” We have a drink for every application I submit. My friends are by my side, venmoing me application fees to egg me on. I say something sappy like, “If I get into grad school, it’s going to be because of you all,” and I mean it!!

• late December: My advisor sees the title of my thesis, “Narrative Mechanisms of Frustration in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro” on my CV and definitely thinks I am talking about some technical computer science mechanisms.

• December 29: I receive an interview request from him.

• January 9: I interview. He asks me about the “narrative mechanisms” and I talk about Ishiguro’s near-unbearable repetition and fondness for writing characters who are devastatingly cruel to those they love.

• January 24: I receive an email from my advisor notifying me of my admission.

The reader is probably watching these dates advance closer and closer to March 2020 and wondering how this ends. Ironically, March 2020 would be a fitting end to this story: the Sunday I return home from visiting UMass as a prospective student, Amherst College students are sent home. Rutgers follows suit later that week, leaving me time to say final goodbyes to my new underclassmen friends and allowing me to realize that I got something a lot of people dream of: an extra year of college.

I’ll have my grad school reveal party at home and post a video of me ripping off tearaway pants to announce my commitment to UMass Amherst (written on my legs). Very fitting.

But where I want The Story™, this story, to end is the night of Jan 24th, after I’ve just received my acceptance notification.

I’m in New York City again for the first time since my visit to Facebook. I have plans to meet my friends at the same bar with the mechanical bull. So I fire off a few quick texts to let my friends and family know that “I’m in!!”, tuck my phone into a pocket I almost certainly don't zip, and get on the subway.

This time, the bull is operational.

Riding the bull was, as I wrote in a text the following day, transcendent. It wasn’t that hard to stay on, but after 30 seconds or so I just let the bull take me and fell into the foam padding surrounding it.

There’s a picture of me on the bull, taken by a photographer friend of mine, from that night. I look beyond elated. It’s posted to Instagram with a caption that says “Riding the mechanical bull was even better than getting into grad school.”