The Application Drain

With the payment to Brown’ and Johns Hopkins’ online application forms, I’ve officially washed my hands of my M.F.A. applications. They are in other people’s hands: in Joe’s, who will match file and ship them off; in my professor’s who has yet to finish recs; in ETS, who must send my GRE scores to several more schools; and most importantly, to the admissions boards of these schools.

Applying is such a numbing drag. I’d forgotten. There are the endless forms to fill out, almost exactly the same yet uncopiable, and the same goes for the essays. Most of them are fairly similar, yet have some extra twist or variation that mean you can’t just duplicate them. You’ve just got to do them.

This is made all the more exasperating by the fact that MFA programs base their selection almost completely on your writing sample (short stories, or a short story and a novel excerpt). To quote my thesis advisor, who sits on the board of a top 5 MFA program: “The writing sample is 99% of the criteria used in making these decisions.”

So, you’ve got all these apps and essays and forms and GREs and checklists and envelopes and it all really boils down to the writing sample. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just sent that in, and went from there?

Ok, bitching done. But since I hate, hate, hate dwelling on things, I took the first two weeks after Internet was established in our flat and just ground my way through these. If you get past the fact that it’s a tremendous hassle to update your resume, it only really takes three to five minutes.

I’m applying to nine schools, which may seem like a lot, but of these nine the highest admission rate might be 10% at most. So no guarantees for sure, particularly because admission is based in something so subjective as whether they like your stories or not. But the same professor said this about my chances (paraphrased this time): “If a reader gets 500 essays, he can throw 400 out on the first read. On a second read he’s down to 30, and another read winnows it down to 15. Most admissions board readers will get to the same 15. From that 15 to five or ten, though, it’s a bit of a crapshoot.”

He said I should be in that 15. So, what I’m hoping for, I guess, is being on the top of that crapshoot. $500 for apps, $150 for GRE and sending scores, $50 for books and shipping, and essentially I’ve paid $700 for nine tickets to land on the top of the crapshoot. Hope my number gets called.