Only Assholes Go to Grad School as Adults

It began as a whim. I had started noticing that I was getting stupider every day. I needed to do something to curtail my downward spiral into idiocy before I got to the point where I’d be too dumb to even read Dear Abby in the newspaper. Now some people would pick up a Suduko book. Others would attempt the New York Times crossword puzzle

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Not me. When I decide to do something, I go big. When I wanted to try running, I didn’t practice for a simple 5k. Nope. I began training for the Los Angeles marathon. And I’d have done it, gosh dang it, if in month six, when we were readying for a half marathon, I hadn’t pulled a groin muscle.

So with what was left of my mind, I decided to back to school. I wasn’t going to just take a course at the local community college or an extension school. Nope. I set my sights on a PhD. In English. At one of the top schools in the country. Hell, I figured if a dope like James Franco could go to Yale for God’s sake, I could go to USC.

In my defense, I was an English major, and then a writer by trade, which I felt would give me a leg up. And I’d gone the Master’s Degree route before, in Journalism. Which is almost as useful a degree these days as Art History. Or English.

When I started researching the seats of higher learning that surrounded me in Southern California  I  discovered that most didn’t offer advanced degrees in English. SC did. Looking through the course catalog sold me. It was like being in a candy shop for intelligent  people. I could take this! And that! With that professor! Or that one! I was hooked. I felt smarter just reading through the list.

Not that there weren’t a few flies in the proverbial ointment. One of the requirements was that I needed to speak a second language. If you know me, you’re aware that I occasionally have trouble with English I have been known to make up a word when an existing one didn’t serve.  A new language was going to be a problem.

You’d also think that the requirement would be Greek or Latin, since that’s the basis for English. In my case, it might as well have been, since languages are not my forte. In grade school I took 6 years of French. Which means that I can now sing “Frere Jacques” perfectly. In middle and high school I took six years of German. “O Tannenbaum!” This time I settled on trying Spanish since that would actually be useful in Southern California.

I  started looking for a tutor.Not surprisingly, that was easy. Just about everyone and their brother,(actually usually their kids, had a Spanish tutor. After talking to a few of them -in English- I found a very patient lady who just so happened to specialize in teaching people who were taking exams.

The next problem loomed even larger: the GREs. The Graduate Record Exams are standardized tests similar to the SATs, but are used for entrance to graduate school. Sadly, the ones I took 30 years ago for J-school had apparently expired, and I’d have to take them again. 

Standardized tests have never been my friend. The idea of taking a four-hour exam was beginning to give me nightmares. Talking to friends that had gone back to school didn’t help. “It will make you cry,” one assured me. “Be prepared to blow your brains out,” said another. One comforted me by recommending a test preparation book. “It helped,” she swore.

So off I went to Amazon.com and bought the fattest GRE prep book I could find. It boasted heaps of tricks and memory boosters as well as actual practice tests. For a week I couldn’t bear to open it. The enormous book sat on my counter scorning me. Finally I cracked it. The first half was the English part. I zipped through it and aced the practice tests. Something had apparently sunk in after 30 years of working with words.

But then I came to the math section. Did I mention that I was an English major? And can barely balance my checkbook? And had to take Algebra 2 twice? And what the Hell does math have to do with my ability to pursue an English degree? I can promise you that Shakespeare never took calculus.

I finally forced myself to open the first math section.  The first paragraph was a blur of numbers and squiggley lines. I slammed the book closed.

I took a deep breath and opened it again slowly. I forced myself to focus and slowly reread the section. I made myself  do everything they said, step by step again and again. I gradually worked through the section. And then the next. I’m never going to be confident about the math part, but I might be able to fake my way through.

I’ve set a deadline to take the test in June. I may still do terribly. Or I may do okay and USC may decide that they don’t want to waste a precious spot on a geezer. But I do feel a little teeny bit smarter. At least I can understand Dear Abby.