letters that change your life

Once upon a time, I decided to go to graduate school.

Obviously a terrible idea -- do you know the kind of medieval (excuse me: mediæval) style torture that English grad students go through? Do you even want to guess at the job placement rate after graduation? Can you even imagine the exquisite torture of sharing your hopes and dreams with a stranger or new acquaintance to see a familiar wrinkling of the nose, to hear an unspoken "...but why?" in his apparent appreciation of the academic institution?

Well, so I'm doing it anyway. I applied to nine graduate schools, from Penn to North Carolina State. As of mid-March, I'd gotten into two out of seven--the two worst, at that. I was actually getting excited for UGA, though: "I can always get out of this state later, once I've graduated." I told myself. "It will be less scary this way."

I urge you, reader, to imagine the surprise of a no-more-than-averagely-successful grad school hopeful upon receiving an envelope from Oxford University, greatest university in the world. This letter contains not the one sad thin piece of paper starting the body of its letter with the word "unfortunately." Rather, the envelope is fat, thick with the promise inherent in lots of words. Dear Miss Smith, this letter begins, I am delighted to inform you...

...and, well, you can guess the rest. Two-and-some months later, another letter told me I was in Regent's Park College, located on Pusey Street in the heart of the city, to study my nine-month M.St. degree. I hadn't dared to hope that Corbin would be willing to come with me, but he is--provided that he can find a job--and so we set off in September for England. I will dedicate another post, I am sure, to waxing philosophical about what this new step means for me, but for now I'm SO EXTREMELY EXCITED to be moving to Oxford with Corbin. God waited until the very moment when I resigned myself (not unhappily) to getting my degree at UGA before he gave me something so much better, and I hope that I can prove to Oxford that they made the right decision.