Grad School

I am trying to create in TRJ both a updated journal and a chronicling of salient events in my recent life. I've been kind of dwelling in the past recently, so here is what I have been up to lately and where I am looking down the road. The road of life.

I am going to graduate school in the fall. It is definitely semi-official. I tell people this. I just don't know where exactly. I have been accepted to Master's Degree programs in history at University of Cincinnati and Miami University (that's Ohio, as opposed to University of Miami, in FL). It looks like those are my choices. Miami has offered me free tuition and a paid assistantship, which is pretty much balls. Cincinnati has not, as of yet, offered me any kind of package. They did offer me an all-expense paid trip to the Nati for their graduate recruitment weekend, which I attended last weekend.

They really showed me a good time -- dinners, drinks, I never paid for anything. That was very nice, but what was especially gratifying for me was having a chance to hang out with and talk to the current grad students. On the whole they were much more down to earth then I expected. I imagined a dedicated group of hard-nosed, bookish scholars. They all seemed serious about their research, but they were real people with social lives and senses of humor. They were all friends and had great rapport with each other. I can't deny that I was surprised and rather elated that there were a good number of attractive and intelligent women in the department. The last event of the weekend was a party at one of their apartments. One of the female students told me, with worn-over frustration, that the go-to talking points of the men in the program are often baseball and the Civil War. These are perhaps my two favorite things to talk about in the history of things.

Also, the faculty were very approachable and answered a lot of my questions, namely: what is grad school like? There is one professor whose interests jive very much with mine. There are a lot of opportunities for inter-disciplinary study, which is of great interest to me. The department also gets a lot of funding, which grad students can receive for research trips and the like. But they haven't yet offered me any of this money, and I am very much hoping they will.

Cincinnati is an interesting town. The are of the UC campus is pretty much right on the edge of a seriously depressed and somewhat dangerous (and large) neigborhood. There are other distinct and cool neighborhoods around the school. The UC campus is very nice, highly concentrated. The architecture is really cool. Its a beer town, they say, and I am a beer guy. My baseball team is there and my football team plays there once a year. They have a world-class library. I think I would like living and studying in Cincinnati. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that unless they offer to pay me, which they haven't, yet. I have two more weeks of holding my hope.

Miami has offered me money. Money that I could live on. Not live high, but live. That is probably good, because I don't think high living would go well with grad school. Especially since I have my sights set high for schools to move up to for the ol' Ph.D. I visited Miami on my way back to Columbus. It is about 40 miles north-northeast of Cincinnati -- middle of nowhere. The campus is beautiful. It is full of beauty. It is the kind of campus that would be a great movie setting: bricks, quads, bells, trees. It is a good school too. The program is not quite on par with UC, but both schools are far from elite so it doesn't matter too much.

Miami is in Oxford, but really Miami is Oxford. Its a small place. I don't think I will say quaint, though others may. Its easy to imagine a scholarly existence there. I think I would like it. And I must follow the money, which they are currently dangling.

At the end of all this coffee charged rambling, here are some firm declarative statements.

1)I am going to grad school. That is awesome.

2)I will receive a full-ride from whichever school I attend. I will assist in teaching actual college courses. I will grade tests, write papers, and probably read an elephants weight in books.

3)I will attend UC if they offer me a comparable package.

4)Failing that, I will attend Miami and be very satisfied with that.

5)I am going to graduate school. Its gonna happen. For serious.