Gimme a G, gimme a R ...

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to know too much.

And after eight years of coordinating student admissions for a graduate department, I certainly know a lot about the challenges and difficulties involved in applying for grad school. So the idea of doing it myself is daunting, to say the least.

But there it is, and it doesn’t seem to want to go away.

The idea is this: to get a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing, in the English Department of the University of Illinois, where I received a bachelor’s in the same subject two years ago. An undergrad program, by the way, that I started in 1963 and finished in 2007. 44 years, with a mere 31-year break when completing my degree program was the farthest thing from my mind.

And still was when I signed up for a Social Issues acting class in 2001, just a few weeks after starting my new job at the university. The class was free -- a lovely fringe benefit -- met right after work just a couple blocks away from my office, and was really more of a repertoire company than a standard class. No homework. No exams. Each semester the students put together productions that explored topics such as racism or sexual abuse and present performances followed by discussion in various venues around campus. It was a great class and gave me the chance to work with some very talented young actors, none of them theatre majors, and a teacher whose low key directing style is amazingly powerful in pulling all the elements of production together to create effective and high-quality performances.

I received one college credit hour for that first class, and two more when I took it again the next semester. And that got me wondering. How many other classes would I need to take to finish my degree requirements? What classes would they have to be?

Thanks to a dedicated and hard-working undergrad advisor in the English department, and an equally conscientious admissions coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I eventually learned that it would take 10 more classes to fulfill the requirements that were in effect when I first started as a freshman.

Of course, two of those classes would have to be general education physical science – Chemistry 101 or some such impossible thing – so I put that out of my mind and started on the fun part of the list. Literature classes. Fiction and non-fiction creative writing classes. Three other acting classes for a partial theatre minor.

Enrolling in just one class per semester, with my work schedule and lunch hours adjusted since these classes all met during the day, it seemed like a very, very long journey to the end of this program. But taking classes became a routine – and very stimulating -- part of my life, and when the day came that I found that all I had left was the dreaded science requirement, time seemed to have flown by to get me to this point.

So there I was, in late August of 2006, sitting in a lecture hall, surrounded as usual by students 40-plus years younger than me --15 years younger than my daughter, for heaven’s sake! – attempting to understand the first lecture in basic astronomy. And pretty darned worried that I wouldn’t grasp a word of it.

I was right to be worried. The subject matter throughout that semester, while interesting, and apparently pretty simple for most of the other students, was light years out of my comfort zone, not to mention my actual capacities of comprehension. Studying for that class took a myriad of hours of puzzling (or just outright memorizing) my way through the textbook and lecture notes as well lots of time spent in the office of the teaching assistant, who probably should get some sort of commendation for helping me. Here was a guy who had been in love with astronomy since he was a little boy, and whose brain wrapped itself around the subject as comfortably as a cat curled up on a pillow, struggling to find new ways to demonstrate the most basic – and to him, obvious -- concepts to someone who had once taken a college aptitude test and scored in the 9-10 range in language and social studies and 1-2 in math and science.

But pass that course I did. And with a B. Can you believe it?

In order to apply to graduate school, I have to take the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. And because of my job, I already know a lot about that. I know it’s a very tough test. I know that students usually study for months to prepare for it, and I’ll have to take it in a few weeks. I’ve seen the modest scores of applicants with near perfect undergrad GPAs, whereas my overall GPA, even with the mostly As and a couple Bs that I earned since 2001, is still in the low C range. I know that one section of the exam is quantitative, i.e., math. And you know, from the astronomy story, how well I’m likely to do on that.

Yep, I definitely know too much.

OK, let’s look at this whole subject logically. Calmly. One step at a time. Application to master’s program: GRE. GPA. Personal statement. Recommendation letters. (Yikes, what if my recent undergrad instructors don’t recommend me? Heck, what if they don’t remember me?) And to up the ante a bit more, I want to specialize in an area that the U of I program doesn’t officially offer, so I’d have to be submit a sample of performance writing rather than the more usual narrative fiction.

But on the other hand, the young woman who directs the MFA program met with me this week for almost an hour and listened to my story, my aspirations, my misgivings. We had already emailed a bit, and while she was kind enough to give me some time during her office hours, I fully expected her to conclude the discussion by telling me that the whole idea was impossible. Forget it. No way.

Instead she encouraged me to apply. Not because she thinks I’ll be accepted, she has no way to assess that yet, but because she thinks it’s possible. Or at least, not impossible.

So I’m thinking.

My daughter wants me to go for it. Apply. See what happens. What would be worse, she says, trying and not being accepted or not trying? A very unfair question, to my mind.

I have to decide quickly in order to have a chance of finding a GRE exam in my part of the world that still has some empty seats. Gads, there it is again. GRE. Scariest three letters in the alphabet at this moment.

But then, I passed astronomy, didn’t I?

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