It was my second chance, which was my first mistake.
I first started looking at grad school in the spring of my junior year of college, just around the same time I accepted that I was not going to be able to save my undergraduate experience from crash-roll-and-burning. My first official visit was Emory, in Atlanta, and I had the unusual experience of being put up in their guest lodging and being reimbursed for the mileage of driving over. I bought a T-shirt, I took the flyers for the PowerBook offerings in their computer store, I met with two faculty (including Alan Abramowitz – how different would my life have been if I’d wound up apprenticed there?), and – oh irony – I watched the Giants beat the Braves that night in my guest room, kicking off a chase for the ages in the NL West, the last real pennant race.
And thus began the grad school hunt. I invoked the help of faculty. I did research. I actually took the practice GRE before taking it once for real (as opposed to just rolling out of bed and taking the SAT and ACT the way I had in high school, with no more prep than making sure to eat bacon and eggs instead of cereal). I even found myself counseled by the director of graduate studies at one of the top five programs for political science in the country – albeit one that didn’t offer funding for first-year grad students. I made sure all my applications were in by Thanksgiving break, including a mad run back to campus to print out personal statements and another mad run to the airport to make sure everything went in FedEx on time.
In short, I did everything I should have done but didn’t when applying to college. And that was the mistake – I was looking to hit the reset button on my college experience, rather than pick out the most suitable graduate school. Which is how I wound up going to a school that offered me the best funding package – but which was in retrospect the lowest-ranked program of the five I got into. (For the record, the other four were Wisconsin, Emory, Washington-St Louis, and Florida State, and how different would my life have been at any of those?)
I think about this now because it has lately occurred to me that college was when spring stopped being good and turned into a misery of exploding allergies and creeping doom. Weather getting hotter, the bleak prospects of needing to find a job for the summer, the misery of moving back home and going back to being miles from anything. Not good. For a decade after starting undergrad, 1994 was the only positive flicker, because I was leaving undergrad and heading north. Even that was bittersweet, because I was still stuck with a psychotic girlfriend and I could already feel the regret at having wasted four years.
Since then? Mixed bag. 2001 came closest to the good ol’ days, with the promise of a new beginning involving a girl from California and the not-inconsequential advent of Mac OS X. But spring thereafter always seemed to mean swamped with work , swamped with work and planning for a job change, or swamped with work and getting married, and the pollen. Always the pollen. At one point, it led to a prescription of three different drugs and a steroid injection for my nose, just do I could inhale enough to get back to the office.
Spring is supposed to be the promise of a new beginning. When the early morning sun sends filtered light down through a canopy of pale green new leaves, and it’s still just shirtsleeve-cool at 8 AM, you can almost believe it. But my new beginnings are always in fall, when the heat breaks and Saturdays bring football. Spring usually just means trouble on the way…