The Worst Thing

It turns out there is one thing worse than applying to grad school—it’s waiting to hear back from grad schools.

Now that I’m on the other side of application due dates, I must admit, taking a year off to apply to graduate school is a smart idea. I have the attention span of a rather alert guinea pig, and like a cat seem to spend more time sleeping than being conscious. With these odds, I had not a snowball’s chance in hell of applying to grad school during my senior year of college. I was lucky I managed to finish all my work on time, much less do anything extra. Now, doubtlessly some of you can surpass my abilities to focus, but if you spend an hour looking at cat videos on youtube before you start doing any work, you might share a part of my problem.

That being said, there are perks to applying to grad school before you graduate—being too occupied with graduating on time to worry about higher education is chief among them. I’ve considered asking my best friend to block from accessing websites on my own computer so I can’t find more fodder for my living-with-my-parents-forever nightmares. But being an English major, I am prone to the melancholic (no really, a professor told me this once) and quite imaginative, so I really don’t need help in the whole worst case scenarios department.

It doesn’t help that every time I share these fears with someone else, the conversation inevitably goes something like this:

Confidant: Everything will work out! Stop worrying so much.

Self: You’re only telling me what I want to hear, you have no idea how things will work out! Nobody knows how things will work out, stop lulling me into a false sense of hope!

Confidant: …. *changes subject swiftly*

Of course, agreeing with a graduate applicant’s pragmatism will also probably backfire, because having their worst fears confirmed, the glimmer of hope they’ve been tending will dissipate like air from a punctured balloon, and if they haven’t already, they might become a borderline alcoholic.

Actually, being your distraught aspiring grad student friend’s drinking companion might be the best path you can take. Someone needs to make sure they don’t drink themselves into a mortal stupor when the bad news comes. Or alternatively, make sure they don’t off themselves when they overindulge with glee. Either way, I think it’s safe to assume that all the aspiring grad students in the world will be seeking solace in the bottoms of our bottles for the weeks to come.

And I hope none of them get into the programs I want to get in to.