Monday, November 26, 2012

I Should Go to Grad School


Two of my kids are graduating from college in the spring. So, they’re in the process of applying to grad school. (Luke in chemistry, and Ariel in math.)

So they’ve been working on everything from personal statements, which are the equivalent of why-you-want-me-in-your-program, to curricula vitae, which is everything-I’ve-ever-done-that’s-vaguely-relevant to why-you-want-me-in-your-program. And, of course, they’ve taken the GRE.

And they’ve been getting emails. Luke’s are from chemistry departments. Ariel’s getting spammed. Recently, she got an email from the University of Colorado encouraging her to apply to their Quantitative Biology program. She said, “Shoot me now,” even though they were offering buckets of money. Matt said, “Does that mean you’d be counting sheep?” Ariel moaned about another program wanting to use her for her math skills. As a parent, that doesn’t sound so bad to me—not when there are buckets of money involved. I wish someone would want to use my mad math skills.

Lately, Ariel’s been getting lots emails from engineering programs. They all start, “Congratulations on your interest in graduate engineering.” She now talks back to the spam—“I never, ever said I was interested in engineering.” I said, “Well, at least, they don’t want you for your math skills. They want you because you’re a girl. Diversity.” I wonder if they’d give her buckets of money. Maybe I should apply to grad school. I could do Quantitative English. I’d love to be paid to count poems.

8 comments:

  1. Um, yeah, buckets of money sounds pretty good to me too. Must be nice to be wanted. LOL

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  2. I wonder how anyone in Sheep Counting stays awake through class???

    Always wondered if maybe I should go back and get a grad school degree. I'd like to be handed a bucket of money. But I think I'd have to give up either writing or having a full time job for that, and I don't think giving up either one is something I want to do right now...

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  3. All I can say is, you must be thrilled to bits to have such successful, smart, sweet kids!

    (as for counting sheep, that was an LOL moment for me!)

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  4. How stressful. I'm just at the beginning of getting my kid into collage and I'm already losing sleep about where he's going to go.

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  5. What a couple of fantabulous "problems" to have! You must be so excited (and proud) for the kids. As for going back to college, if you wait until you're an old fartessa like me, you can take college courses for free!

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  6. Smart kids you have there! And going back to college would actually be very interesting :)

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  7. This made me laugh--I used to work in university recruiting, and...yeah. Ineffective spamming never got a student enrolled! Especially being congratulated on interests you never had!

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