The Grad School Maze

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Acceptance Letters, African American History, Applications, Dr. Jack L. Daniel, GPA, Graduate School, GRE Scores, History, Howard University, Incompetence, Lessons, MA Programs, NYU, Pitt, Rejection Letters, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland College Park, US History, UVA

An endless maze, May 24, 2014. (http://turbosquid.com/).

It’s been a quarter-century since I had to choose my academic path post-bachelor’s degree. That statement in itself is proof that I am no longer young, seeing that I was barely smart enough at twenty-one to decide on my advanced degree path in the first place.

In the fall of ’90, I had applied to six schools to do master’s degree (and potentially PhD) work in the history field: University of Pittsburgh, UC-Berkeley, University of Maryland-College Park, Howard University, University of Virginia, and New York University. I had briefly considered law schools, but decided against a year or torts and contracts for something a bit more relevant to my interests. Beyond the master’s, I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a doctorate, teach, write, work outside academia, or just find a job that enabled me to buy my first car. Such are the issues with a student too close to his former life of grinding poverty making decisions about an ill-defined path to his future. I could’ve been my eleven-year-old self applying to Humanities for middle school for the first time, almost as naive, and nearly as myopic.

My GPA at the time of my applications in October ’90 was a 3.28 (I’d reach a 3.4 by the end of the spring semester ’91), with a 3.8 as a history major, and my one GRE test had me in the 64th percentile in reading, 54th in math, and 78th in analytical. The analytical section was new and — as I sensed at the time (and would learn for sure a few years later) — the most relevant part of the GRE for anyone planning on a humanities or social sciences graduate degree. But I couldn’t convince either Berkeley or UVA of that. Berkeley rejected me in January ’91, saying that the GRE scores of their typical students were in the 80th and 90th percentiles in math and reading. UVA sent me a one-page rejection a month later. As I learned later on, my post-1900 focus on US and Black history — UVA’s main specializations were pre-1900 US and African American history — was the biggest reason for my rejection.

University of Virginia Cavaliers’ sabers logo, March 21, 2016. (http://www.southwesttimes.com).

By March, I started to hear more positive news. NYU had accepted me into their program just before Pitt’s mid-March Spring Break, and Pitt’s acceptance followed soon after. I had been back and forth with Howard’s graduate admissions office, who had acknowledged receipt of my application packet before losing it for two months, finding it and sending it back to me because I missed one checkbox on the first page, and then losing it again in February. By the time Howard found my packet again and then accepted me, I had already moved on in my mind.

The main sticking points in most of these acceptances were around my GRE scores or what aid or fellowships I qualified for. Not one school knew what to do with my GRE analytical score, but they seemed quick to jump on my math score as cause for concern. Seriously, unless I had planned to be a statistician or engineer, why would my math score matter in earning an MA in History? Wouldn’t my ability to do broader analysis beyond numbers matter more?

As for aid and fellowships, this was where the University of Maryland became part of the story. They had also accepted me initially in March, but somehow managed to “lose” my application packet for more than a month. I say “lose,” because the admissions office and the history department at College Park lost my application just long enough for all the deadlines to grant fellowships and departmental aid to pass. Not exactly a coincidence.

Afterward, the folks at College Park contacted me to let me know that I was a “provisional status” grad student if I wanted to do my master’s work at UMD. I was “provisional” because of my GRE math score, thus making me ineligible for aid, and requiring a minimum GPA of 3.25 my first semester before being granted any aid. NYU, for its part, wanted me to sign a letter of commitment to the university and the history program before revealing to me any financial aid or fellowship options at all. Even I knew that this was ridiculous, especially after my experience with Columbia four years earlier.

This week twenty-five years ago, I began saying no. I said no to NYU’s heavy-handed slight-of-hand acceptance, and I’d say no to College Park’s deceit seventeen days later. I never actually responded to Howard at all, figuring that my packet was gathering dust bunnies in a dry-as-dust room in Founders Hall.

New York University logo, March 21, 2016. (http://pinoyespressoshots.com).

That left Pitt as my only choice, a place that despite its nurturing, was now lukewarm to me as a student they accepted into their master’s program. It would take a small miracle, in the form of Pitt’s assistant provost Jack Daniel, for me to have the money I needed to earn my master’s degree.

What are the lessons here? That I should’ve worked full-time for a year after graduation, taken some more courses to raise my GPA to a 3.5 and my history GPA to a 3.9? That given my interests, I should’ve also applied to schools of education for an MA in education with a focus in history? That the change to add the analytical section of the GRE was a waste of money and time? That admissions officers and departmental selection committees in the pre-Internet era were even more incompetent in 1991 than they are today?

The most important lesson for me was that grad school wasn’t completely about merit. Just because I had the grades and other achievements and intangibles didn’t mean that admissions offices and departmental committees would recognize them. People play favorites, provide aid and opportunities to some and not others equally deserving, out of spite, because of narrow-mindedness, or because of their -isms. That applying to graduate school was no safe haven, that there were folks who not only didn’t want me to success, but who would actually actively work to make sure I didn’t succeed.

That was a sobering reality. The kind of disillusionment that was the stuff of success for me over the subsequent six years.

Aside

Past Labor’s Opportunities Lost

07 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Anger, CMU, Dissertation Completion, Howard University, Jealousy, job search, Joe William Trotter Jr., Labor Day, Mentoring, NYU, Post-Docs, Rage, Running Interference, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Steven Schlossman, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title page of the first quarto of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), uploaded May 2, 2011 (Tom Reedy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One of the more gut-wrenching periods of my career began right after Labor Day 1995. In some respects, that period of my career has left a stain over the past two decades. Not so much in terms of what I have done or in what I’m doing now, as much as in setting limits on the range of possible outcomes with which I could’ve begun my career.

Right after Labor Day, I saw an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education for an open-ranked (tenured or tenure-stream) position at NYU’s school of education in US education history. I hadn’t thought about teaching in a school of education before, but after meeting my friend Cath and having received my Spencer Foundation fellowship, I understood that this was likely a better choice for me than a history department. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My department chair Steven Schlossman had received a letter and a telephone call from his equivalent peer at NYU asking if there were any graduate students in the pipeline who could apply for the position. Schlossman apparently told that department chair about me and my multiculturalism dissertation, and caught up with me that same week to give me a copy of the letter and encouraged me to apply for the job.

I was two-and-a-half chapters into my planned eight-chapter dissertation, and I still had some US Census data to look at and interviews to conduct as part of the process. I knew that my advisor Joe Trotter wouldn’t be happy about the idea of me applying for a job so soon into the process, but Schlossman and I also knew that the job — if I somehow got it — wouldn’t start for eleven months. That was more than enough time for me to write, revise, revise again, polish up and defend my dissertation. I was on a Spencer fellowship, after all!

A defensive pass interference penalty not called, Detroit Lions v. Dallas Cowboys Wildcard Game, January 4, 2015. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2319198-refs-pick-up-flag-after-pass-interference-on-cowboys-in-4th-quarter; FOX Sports).

Of course Trotter thought otherwise. He was incensed that Schlossman had discussed the NYU job with me, that I hadn’t talked with him about the position first. Of course Trotter said that he needed to “run interference” on my behalf, to protect me and my career. By “running interference,” Trotter meant that he would not write a letter of recommendation on my behalf. He told me to put the job out of my mind, to focus on my dissertation, and that we could revisit the prospect of apply for jobs when I was much further along.

A few months later, in February ’96, I saw another job ad in the Chronicle, this one for a history of education assistant professorship at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Schlossman saw that ad as well, but I was still the dutiful ABD student with Trotter as my patron. I decided this time to approach Trotter before meeting with Schlossman about the job. Trotter flipped out again, telling me, “you’re not ready,” that he had seen too many of his own peers not finish dissertations when taking jobs, only to end up unemployed. Keep in mind, I had written six of my eight chapters at this point, and had started working on number seven that month.

Trotter’s “you’re not ready” pronouncements rang even more hollow in March, when I requested a letter from him to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship in African American Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. He refused at first, then agreed, with the caveat that he would write in his letter his belief that I wouldn’t complete my dissertation in time to begin the fellowship at the end of August ’96. With that kind of endorsement, of course I didn’t apply!

When we finally had our blow-out argument that April 4th, I was frustrated, he was actually angry, for reasons I didn’t put together until I considered my age and his HNIC status and age later on. Most of Trotter’s stonewalling occurred after he found out that I was still only about to turn twenty-six at the time of the NYU job prospect. Between that and the limited mileage remaining in his proletarianization hypothesis, I was working for and with an advisor who was giving me mixed signals and mediocre advice. Both were based in part on jealousy, and in part on Trotter’s own bad experiences at University of Minnesota and on the job front in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Danger Bad Advice Ahead fake sign, September 7, 2015. (http://wordspicturesweb.com).

Trotter didn’t understand that in blocking my first attempts to begin my career, he had helped set up a struggle for me to have even a semblance of a career before I had completed the first draft of my dissertation. As it was, I finished the first draft in June ’96, the second at the end of July, and polished it up before Labor Day Weekend ’96. That fact that I was done with all major revisions to my dissertation in time for any job that year made ready to strangle Trotter at that point.

Still, it would be only fair to say that my career moves — good and bad, smart and stupid — have mainly been of my own making. It would also be unfair to blame Trotter for any moves that I have made or didn’t make that didn’t work out after 1996-97. But every career has a beginning. And in the beginning, Trotter was there, making a mess of my first steps. It took until the spring of 2000 before Howard University offered me a tenure-track position in Afro-American Studies, to which I did say no. I didn’t need any more Joe Trotter’s in my life at that point, and working in the nonprofit world paid my bills better than teaching at that time.

My overall advice would be to make damn sure that you choose an advisor who cares about your whole career and about you as a person. Don’t choose someone to advise and mentor you out of convenience, and make sure that your advisor isn’t someone who just wants to mold you into a mediocre version of themselves. After all, it’s not their career trajectory or reputation that’s on the line. It’s yours.

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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'91, 1991, Adulthood, Civic Arena, Class of 1991, Diversity, Fellowships, Financial Aid, Graduate School, Graduation, Job, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, NYU, Pitt, Student Loans, Uncertainty, Ungraduate Education, University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Posvar, Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic, Work

University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.