Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015
Middlebury college - The Bread Loaf school of english
General graduate studies
In my first year out of college, I moved to the big city and took a job as an Assistant Account Executive—which is to say, a peon—at a gigantic public relations firm specializing in New York City landmarks. The glamour of the company attracted me, and I’d somehow glossed over what seems to me now to be the obvious route for a graduate with a serious passion for English. So when my human resources interviewer dropped the name “Rockefeller Center” as a client, and the words “Christmas Tree Lighting,” which was to be my newest, biggest event, my heart fluttered. Sitting in her office then I couldn’t suppress the image: under my fur-trimmed earmuffs, my high-tech earpiece vibrates with top secret instructions to escort an A-list celebrity from one side of the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink to the other, precisely at the moment that the 90-foot Christmas tree above us bursts into light with the glow of 100,000 megawatt Christmas bulbs. I can’t explain now why that vision ever seemed reasonable—let alone alluring—to me, but it did. So I took the job.
Seven months later, I was standing under that Christmas tree in the center of the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, but the picture looked a little different. For one, I was crying—not joyful tears, but the ugly, face-reddening kind that well up despite, and because of, best efforts to remain calm. I was wearing an earpiece, and it was vibrating—with the deafening shouts of an angry boss who couldn’t figure out which members of the Tokyo Foreign Press belonged behind which barricade. In that moment, I had what my friends and I refer to as an “OBOE”: an Out of Body Omniscient Experience. (Draw your own conclusions from the fact that we’ve named this feeling, and that it includes the word “omniscient.”) In my OBOE, something clicked: I was unhappy. And it didn’t take a genius to trace this feeling back to its root; I had taken the wrong job, and I had known it practically from the very first day I took it. I needed to be stimulated—not by fluorescent lights and fancy names—but by a community of people who would challenge me intellectually and push me to be better.
When I finally summoned the courage to march (read: sheepishly tiptoe) into my boss’s office 2 months later to deliver the news that I was leaving to pursue the career I’d actually wanted—in teaching—he said something that I’ll never forget. Not a man of many words, he opened his mouth and announced, “I knew it when you started. You’re such a teacher.” I was floored. If this chain-smoking, cell-phone-clutching, lifelong public relations devotee had known all along that I was supposed to be a teacher, how had I missed it?
His flatly delivered words, surely not meant as praise, were all the reassurance I needed that I’d made the right decision. And in the year and a half that have passed since I took a teaching fellowship position, I’ve never doubted it. Having had a job that I hated makes me appreciate—every single day—having one that I love. It is challenging, it is rich, it is new every day, and it is fulfilling in a way that I struggle to describe.
I teach two sections of freshmen girls, a coeducational section of sophomores, and another of seniors. The breadth of experience between class periods, even, is more diverse and enlightening than a year at my corporate job. On any given day, I spend first period dissecting blame in Capote’s In Cold Blood, second squealing over Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy, third period cursing Dorian Gray’s mistakes in Wilde’s twisted novel, and by fifth, I’m back to Mr. Darcy. I’m inspired and challenged by the students I teach, and I want, badly, to be the best version of their English teacher that I can possibly be.
This very real need is what drives me to apply to graduate school to obtain a Master of Arts Degree in English. Having taught others, I’m ready to be taught again, and to draw on my experience as an educator in order to learn in a totally new way. I consider myself fortunate that I struggle when asked about an inspirational teacher I’ve had. I have a laundry list. I loved English in high school, when a teacher named Scott Tucker taught me to dive in and enjoy the bliss of wrapping myself in T.S. Eliot’s words, even if I didn’t—and I didn’t most of the time—know what they meant. I loved English in college, when Professor Libbie Rifkin dropped me squarely, and without help, into the world of twentieth-century postmodern fiction, asking me to cling to whatever shred of meaning I could find and explode it. I even loved it postcollege, when I shied away from the foreignness of applying to teaching jobs, did what my friends did, and “went corporate,” spending my after-work hours poring over whichever book I’d most recently read about in the paper or borrowed from a friend. And I love it now, when I strain my ears in the English Department office to overhear the advice of a colleague to his student about topic sentences; the sheer intelligence and eloquence I’m surrounded by every day make me certain that this job is going to continue to make me better.
Perhaps it sounds selfish, but I’m pursuing a Masters in English in order to accelerate that “bettering.” I want to relearn texts I’ve seen before and fill in the gaps in my literary knowledge where they exist. I want to read non-Western works and take whole courses about a single text. I want to study authors and poets and literary movements with a group of people who want the same thing: to be the best version of an English teacher that they can be. I hope to teach English for as long as my professional career lasts, and as such, I can’t imagine ever feeling satisfied with my knowledge of literature. Part of the allure of this job, at least for me, is in the constant, nagging thirst to know more, and to learn from those who know it—my students included. I hope that by attending graduate school, I will be able to absorb the knowledge of both my professors and my classmates, whose careers in teaching and commitment to lifelong learning will no doubt be sources of inspiration for me.
About a month ago, as I was flipping through television channels to find some ambient background noise for grading the large stack of essays in my lap, I came across the broadcast of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting. And in that moment, I had another OBOE: I’ve never been happier, and I cannot wait to continue to learn to do my job better.
