On my desk at work, I have had a note that says something like “write up the admissions process, post statements of purpose” for months. Of course, I can’t really tell you what is exactly on it because I haven’t been into work for months and months. It is right next to a different post it that tracks things I want to get better at, from Excel to R to Calculus to working on my poetry.
I’ve previously posted in other places two separate essays, one about committing to the process of applying for a PhD in economics and then another about the waiting game, written after all the applications were in. I was feeling good. I had done what I thought was well enough on the GRE (166 verbal, 164 Quant, 4.5 Writing) and I was on my way to finish up the Master’s Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago with a 4.0. I had just finished a graduate level math class with an A, one where I was worried I was overmatched at the beginning but put the work in to make the grade.
And then the waiting game dragged.
My wife and I have made a tradition of planning out the next year as we drive to our see our families over Christmas. We live near Chicago and my family is in West Virginia and her family is in Kansas, so we have decently long drives to plan this out. The thing with this most recent trip was that there were so many unknowns about 2020 as 2019 came to a close. The focus was on finishing up my schooling and fixing up the house so that we could sell it and maybe move to wherever.
I had applied to a mix of schools. Some because they made geographic sense, some reaches because I had never applied to Harvard when I was eighteen and I wanted to get a letter from Harvard, and then the six schools that don’t shun you for left-wing thought in economics – UMass, UMKC, The New School, Utah, American University and the University of Utah. Roosevelt is in this mix, but it doesn’t offer a PhD. What this meant was that we might be staying in Chicago, or there was a potential to move to a new city and try to find a place to live and maybe find new jobs. But it all depended on what the admissions committees said.
I got my first response, from American University in January even before their deadline. They let me in but then when I emailed about funding, they said that funding decisions would be made in the months to come. And then I got a bunch of rejections. And the New School let me in but only as an MS student. By the middle of April I had been rejected by all but the heterodox schools, which was fine since that’s where I really wanted to go (I had been wearing a UMass baseball had since I went to URPE conference almost two years ago now in Amherst). I was hanging out on their waitlist just hoping to hear back positively from them.
There were several problems with the process, the first and foremost was that of the three schools that let me into the doctoral program, none offered funding. I had agreed with my wife that I would not accept any offer that did not come with funding. As a mid-career professional, I make a decent salary so my opportunity cost is higher than someone just out of school, but it was not high enough that I could pay tuition and live in a city like DC or NYC while entirely supported by my wife as a sugar momma. The opportunity cost is just higher. We still have debt from all my other schooling. The other problem of course was this pandemic. Had I thought about perhaps accepting at a school and maybe borrowing to pay tuition and living frugally in normal times, the environment in March and April looked to me like it would be impossible to find a new job in a place where we had no network for my wife and there was no guarantee what school would look like in the academic year staring in fall 2020 would look like. If it ever made sense to invest in yourself by increasing that old student debt balance, it did not in the spring of 2020. So I emailed the directors of graduate study at the schools that let me in and told them in the middle of April telling them that I could not enroll without funding, so thank you for the offer and expect to see my application again. On top of all of this my father passed suddenly in February, which cast a pall over everything and induced additional trauma that is separate from the pandemic but cumulative. I feel I was in the middle of the grieving process when the lockdowns started.
So it was when I was refreshing GradCafe hoping to see people posting results and waiting to hear back from the schools I applied to, that I didn’t just want good news, but I wanted some counterweight to the sadness that has been sitting on top of me. But the cloud never dissipated. UMass eventually emailed that they didn’t have anyone not accept their offer and that was that. The huge empty space in our plans for the year stayed an empty space. And even without the generalized malaise of the pandemic it would be weird for me since there has been a sense of dual momentum in my life for the past decade, as I have ascended in my professional career doing new and interesting things and academically as I reinvented myself. (I first became interested in business and economics after the 2008 crash and that was after going to undergrad and an attempt at a master’s degree in English. (I’m still working on that MA, as I thought having started but not finished it would look bad on potential PhD applications. I was going to finish that this spring too, but with everything else it was amazing I was able to finish the Econ MA program class I took.)) So right now, there’s no momentum between not having been accepted into a funded program and being in this stasis that we call work from home.
The process of applying for a PhD is stressful. You have to have had taken the right classes and done well in them and fostered collegial relationships with your professors and then take a standardized test where there’s incredibly high stakes on how well you do in speed algebra. You have to figure out what schools you want to go to and try to figure out who you might want to work with and then you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in this process. And then there’s the waiting. If I have one real criticism of the process it is the lack of transparency. It is especially interesting that it happens in economics, because in theory you should have a transparent market operating at maximum efficiency but that is not the case in practice. You have walls of mystification that as an applicant you might try to break through and the people you talk to on message boards are just as clueless as you are. As much as I love Roosevelt, I worry that since it is such a small program it’s not really a pipeline that sends its students off to PhD programs every year, so there’s just less institutional knowledge about the process. I didn’t have anyone in my cohort to commiserate about the process, for better or worse.
The stress is doubled when things don’t go the way you wanted them to go. It brings out the doubt and all the second guessing. I was accepted to three schools and that was awesome. I would have loved to attend any of them. I had kept saying was all that I needed was one place to say yes and take a chance on me. So close, and yet… Second guesses abound. Should I have applied to different schools? Should I have used a different paper for my writing sample? Should I have asked for different letter writers? How can I redo my statement of purpose? And worries about things by this point out of my control, like why didn’t I come out of undergrad as a dual major in math and economics? How much programming should I have done? Should I have not emailed the professors and just hung around waiting for an offer to come through?
Back when I wrote that note where I wanted to post this essay, I had in mind a different version of this essay. It was going to be more triumphant, cautiously optimistic about the journey ahead but a little scared of the uncertainty of the path. This is not that essay, and it is fine. When asked about a plan B my response was that I have a job I like, and I live in a community that is home to me. The worst case was the status quo. This setback is not a point of failure but a time for a moment of reevaluation and reflection. What can I do to make my profile better to get over that hump? What kind of research can I do? The pandemic troubles all that though. It means that not just me, but all of us have to exercise our resilience especially because we don’t know what the second order and beyond effects this whole thing will have for the state of higher education. We know that in normal times a bad economy drives up applications. The environment will be more competitive. There may be a counter to that as xenophobia makes US institutions less appealing. I hope not. I want to learn with and from the best of the best in the world.
I had imagined that this essay would signal the start of one journey and the start of another. I wasn’t wrong. I just stepped on a different path. I am not done yet.
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