Decision Time Approaches

April 15th is approaching and that means decision time for graduate schools.

It’s been such a strange process to go through. You send in so many different applications with the hope that they will pick you. Then, come January or February the posision reverses and (if you’re lucky) you have schools trying to attract you.

I was lucky enough to get into both University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Oregon at Eugene for language documentation.Looking back, I can’t feel too bad about any of the rejections. I was a little naive in the process about the formalist/functionalist distinction, so I didn’t tailor my essays as well as I could have. But, I think in the long run, that’s a good thing. I was honest about my interests, and I think it helped both me and the schools see that I was either right or wrong for their school.

Now that I have all the offers, it’s such a tough decision.

My husband works in a pretty specialized field, so it looks like either way he won’t be able to come with me immediately. Neither Santa Barbara nor Eugene are all that good of job markets for him, but I know his preference would be for Eugene’s climate. On the other hand, I have more friends at Santa Barbara, because of work and from inField.

As much traveling as I’ve done this semester, I’m looking forward to my visit to Oregon. It’s a little late in the process for a visit, but I really want to see how well I fit in with the students and professors there. Plus, I have a friend in the English PhD program there, so it’ll be nice to say hi to her as well.

While I was at the Language Documentation conference in Hawai’i, I spoke to a lot of 2nd and 3rd year graduate students. Most of them said this decision was the most difficult one that they’ve had to make. One even said it was harder than deciding to get a divorce. I liked the story of one of my friends who said that he literally filled out the paperwork for both schools he was considering and right before he left for a trip, he gave one package to his parents to mail.

Their stories made me feel much better about being a little stressed.