grad app...submitted
This is just the app, mind you, but at least I managed to bust out a silly little statement thingy. GRE scores are in, transcripts are on their way, and the final piece of the app is the writing sample. Oh yes, the
writing sample. I have until April 1st to get it to the department, but that's part of Spring Break and I don't think people will be around...and since I intend to physically hand it to a real person (distrustful of mail, much?) that means I should have it done the week before.
Some
very nice people have offered their advice on what to do for the sample (my problem being that I have very little in the way of writing samples, unless they want ten books on programming or some papers on business-related matters such as strategic management, which I dare say they do not). I haven't completely decided yet, but I have narrowed it down to either revamping the Vict Lit paper from last semester (which was always intended to be the sample, but I biffed it) or writing my AmNovel paper six weeks early. I nixed the idea of writing my British/Irish Fiction paper six weeks early, because I know that whatever I'm going to write about will come from the second half of the course, and I'd like to hear the lectures on those topics first!
Scrivener took me to task in an helpful email, thought I was rationalizing something or another because I said I didn't want to ask for help from faculty because I wasn't in the department, etc. He's probably right to some extent, but I have a big problem asking for things in a meeting when I don't come to the table fully prepared with "my side". I think this comes from the way we do things in my job, how we interact with clients and what not. I forget that the interaction between a client and a vendor is different than the interaction between a student and a teacher, because the student isn't expected to already have the answers else why would they have to meet with the teacher? But I'm not used to doing things that way, being the student who comes to a prof for help with no clue where to start. I
must have a clue where to start, otherwise I'd feel as if I were wasting their time. Scrivener says he'd think of that as a teaching opportunity, I say I'd think of that as wasting the prof's time. Obviously, I have a long way to go before I work out these sorts of differences in my brain.
Anyway, I think this weekend will help me to figure out which of the two papers I'm going to use for my sample. I have an inkling of an idea for the AmNovel class, even have some books and articles from a jaunt to the library last week. If I can spend some time with those this weekend, and come out of it with a concrete idea and a preliminary bibliography, then I'll make an appointment with the AmNovel prof and run it by her (and my reasons for doing it). But if I come out of it with more questions and tangential thoughts than I did going into it, I'll just revamp the Vict Lit paper since it's already more than halfway done.
