You Dub

It looks like I'm going to be a Husky.

I finally got some good news this evening, when I received a call from Professor James Felak, informing me that I have been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington in Seattle.

That's right, I'm going to be a professional student.

Phew. That's a relief.

Nothing's written in stone yet. I still haven't heard from Columbia (though I'm expecting the worst) or Indiana (which would have to come up with a really sweet and lucrative offer for me to willingly forgo life in Seattle or New York for six-plus years in Bloomington, Ind.). But at the moment UW is far and away the front-runner.

What's really great is that Professor Felak called to tell me. Not just the nicety of it, mind you. But as a general rule, when schools call to inform applicants of acceptance, it indicates that they really want the candidate to come to their program. Graduate admissions is a highly competitive field in both respects. There are a lot of highly qualified prospective students vying for an insufficient number of spots, but then there are also the schools trying to woo top students away from other elite universities.

The paradox of this is that while I wasn't deemed worthy of admission to Stanford, Berkeley or Michigan, I've still got at least Washington in hot pursuit of me.

Professor Felak called in part because he wanted to let me know I had been accepted. ("You're definitely in," were roughly his exact words.) But he also wanted to inform me that he was trying to get me some decent funding. Evidently I'm an alternate or in consideration for at least two or three fellowships. One that would be especially nice is for four years off the bat, for a respectable stipend, plus tuition and benefits. I could go for that. There are others of differing lengths and dollars, but the upshot is that it seems he and the department are going to do their damnedest to get me enough money to make me able to go to the UW and to want to go there.

I'm down with that.

Mainly, it's just a tremendous weight lifted from my shoulders. On the one hand, I no longer have to ponder the very bleak (and what for the past week has seemed like a very possible) scenario in which I get shut out of every grad school I applied to, trying to recover from a pretty severe blow and left to pick up the pieces and try to figure out what I do with my life now. On the other hand, I can relax, smile and keep trying to let sink in the fact that I have been accepted to a Ph.D. program in Eastern European history. And at a damn fine school, no less. Yeah, I'm exceedingly jazzed. Just thinking about that -- relishing it -- has me feeling all wound up with adrenaline again, reliving that sensation of numb induced by giddiness.

In the meantime, I get to continue entertaining this dream to become a professor of Eastern European history, with the knowledge that I am going to get a great shot at it now. I've toiled for four years as an undergrad, I've racked my brain filling out applications, I've sweated out the decision process. Now I get the privilege of starting all over, staring down six years or so of intensive labor and then the crapshoot that is the academic job market.

But having glimpsed and experienced enough of the alternative, having seen firsthand what it would be like to toil in some office or other job for forty years, I know I'll have the motivation and the drive to persevere.

Plus, it'll be pretty damn cool to some day be able to add those three letters to my signature. Even if it is pretentious and I'm too laid back to use them as a matter of course.