Prepoceros

So classes are over, and I find myself with a full load of work to do and a week of unstructured time; there’s a recipe for success, eh?

I spent a good chunk of today drawing up a beautiful spreadsheet of all the grad programs we’re applying to and their deadlines, fees, number of rec letters, extra materials, etc. I bet “making a spreadsheet about it” is one of the top ten ways to make yourself feel productive without actually accomplishing anything useful, right between “writing a to-do list” and “printing labels for all your file folders.”

It’s a lovely spreadsheet, if I do say so myself. Got colors and everything. So far it only lists Texas schools*, though we’re holding open the potential of relocating out of state, most likely to San Francisco or Boston—somewhere with decent public transportation and a reasonable regional population density, both of which Texas lacks.

If the world were made of unicorns and rainbows, we’d both get into UT—he in Physics, I in Law—and live happily in Austin amongst the semi-desert wildlife.** Fortunately and unfortunately, Texas is 11th in Physics and 25th-ish in Law, which makes it both enticing and tough to get into.

So much of the stress in grad school apps, I think, is having to apply everywhere at once, and then not finding out how you’ve done until it’s too late to change anything. At what point does it stop being worthwhile to send fifty bucks and a specially-written personal statement and letters of rec to your seventh-choice school in a town you’re not sure you could stand***? How many cities and possible Physics-Math-Law combinations should we investigate?

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* UT, Rice, A&M, UH, and Baylor

** They have some freaky animals out there, y’all. When John and I were visiting his friend Ryan this summer, we saw a giant centipede-looking thing that was A FOOT LONG, bright blue and red and yellow. I would not have been surprised to find a pile of glowing radioactive sludge around the corner.

*** Here I allude to Waco, one of whose biggest assets, according to the Baylor website, is that it’s within an hour and a half of Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth. Oh, and it has a mall. And THREE movie theaters.

Tags: school

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.