I submitted my PhD application to Syracuse 19 days ago.
I have been checking The Grad Cafe, Reddit, and my email a billion times a day to see if any decisions have been released for UC Denver or Syracuse. Obsessive is hardly the word for my behavior.
It turns out I DO want the approval of academics. Desperately.
I was trying to figure out the other day if I actually want the approval, or if what I want is something that I am pretty sure I cannot have. That the obsession I'm currently living through is less to do with drive and more to do with the selfishness of demanding I be given a thing that was never meant to be mine because my covetousness refuses to allow me the grace of saying, "well...it isn't for me, and that is ok". Which thing is real? One? Both? A secret third thing?
When I finished scouring Denver's EaHD program's professor list and finally found someone with research that aligns with my research interests, she and I emailed back and forth, very pleasantly, until I asked about future funding. My focus is...broadly...queerness. The climate has never been warm to queerness in academia...in any form, really...but very obviously this moment is practically at a temperature closing in on absolute zero. When I expressed concern about what future projects may look like (because as any prospective PhD candidate knows, programs are centered on research, research is centered on funding, and thus your acceptance is pretty largely hinged on who is doing funded research that aligns with your focus), and did she have any outlook on how bleak a future we may have as a possible mentor-mentee pair, I never heard back from her. I gave it a few weeks, not wanting to be a bother. It was, after all, the beginning of the semester, and I could only imagine the stress she was under. As the weeks gave way to months, I began to wonder if NOW was the time to email, or if I would look demanding. Was now the time to email, or would I seem entitled? Had I upset her? Did I ask a bad question?
By the time I turned in my application, I was truly worried that I had fucked up that portion of the journey. One of the things they ask you to highlight in your personal statement is a professor you've created a relationship with who is willing to be your mentor. I omitted that from my statement. I did not know if she was willing anymore. When I got an email a couple of weeks later that my submitted application needed another transcript that hadn't been turned in, I bemoaned that those two things in conjunction made me look too stupid and careless and unfocused that I surely had blown my chances period. I was assured by almost everyone in my orbit that I was still a really good candidate, everything was fine.
But secretly something else was gnawing at the back of my mind. Something I had really only said in an unanswered email to my would be mentor.
Was there even space (read: money) for me in academia right now?
As I looked for professors at Syracuse who shared my focus, I found none. I reached out to three professors who had foci that were adjacent ENOUGH to my focus, got an answer back from one, and that answer felt curt, honestly, and wondered again if academia was hitting a for real brick wall moment for anybody in the DEI pathway. Not like the usual white supremacy brick wall that has always been scuttling between progress and people, but a black hole of it. When I talked with the director of Syracuse, I expressed concern at this. My focus is queerness, I said, and I'm deeply worried about funding. He assured me that Syracuse is funded separately and not beholden to the whims of the federal government. Well ok. Denver did not give me any such reassurances. In fact, Denver really does not offer much in the way of funding. Which is upsetting.
I've spent the last few weeks thinking that the ultimate foil to my acceptance into a PhD program is the lack of acceptance of queerness. And isn't it ironic that my fucking research proposal is EXACTLY that. I proposed a longitudinal study on social attitudes toward queerness if queerness is normalized in academic settings. Syracuse asks you to propose research, that was what I proposed. Denver asks what you think is missing in the field, and I said the normalization of queerness.
Do I stand firm by those things? I sure fucking do. But I think that Denver's hands may be tied here, and I think that Syracuse just doesn't have the professorship.
I suppose we'll see. For all of my obsessing over decisions being released, I feel confident that I won't hear from anybody until at LEAST February. Mid to late. But I have already resigned myself to a double rejection, and while I feel pretty sure that I as a candidate am maybe not ideal just by virtue of myself, I also think that any rejections I get will be in no small part because I focus on queerness in academia.
Waiting is misery. Just give me my rejections so I can cry about it and move on.
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