Before I started graduate school, I was having a pretty rough time. I had come back from Japan suddenly the year before to help with a family emergency and spent the ensuing year doing “service” for an Americorps non-profit that I am not going to name here because I am about to start mudslinging.
This non-profit was the worst job I ever had and that’s including the four months I spent in the freezer of a meat-packing factory. The idea behind the organization was like a bad joke: they wanted us to find kids aged 9-16 who wanted to start their own businesses and to “help” them get started with minimal seed funding (not anywhere enough to actually help) and advice (though the chances of finding an Americorps volunteer with enough bureaucratic savvy to help sort out a non-profit tax form or any background in business at all are very slim). The premise was a mess and the day-to-day just got worse. It was like living in a sadder, glummer version of a Dilbert cartoon. The supervisor would call us every five to ten minutes if we were out of the office (which we had to be to reach those elusive teens who spend all that free time they don’t have dreaming of their own small businesses) to “check in” to make sure we hadn’t taken a second longer than was absolutely necessary to establish that, no, that group of teens was also not interested in adding a full time job to their full time student life. Every decision was questioned, every moment was monitored, and there was no progress being made anywhere. It was demoralizing on the best days, soul-draining on the worst.
When I got my acceptance letter to the University of Michigan, I was sure I would go. I went to the “will they or won’t they” weekend of prospective students because even taking a day off of work would have been the highlight of my month; travelling half-a-country away from the job was just icing on the cake.
I had one of those calamitous journeys on the way here, the sort that’s a funny story later but ridiculously frustrating to live through. There were delayed flights, yes, but there were more eccentric mishaps as well: there was the fact that I, a native New Yorker, assumed that if the plane arrived in Detroit, then the Detroit Amtrak station must be nearby and that it would be a necessary step on the way to Ann Arbor (this is not true and your cab driver will laugh at you when he realizes what you’re asking him to do). And then it started to snow. In April.
But then came the bit that would have decided me even if I hadn’t decided beforehand: when I finally found my way to the English department, I was beyond late. I was so late that I was early for the next event. And my year of Real World Office Experience had taught me that you get a Harry Potter-style Howler when you’re five minutes late, let alone as late as I was. It had been awful getting that far and I totally expected to get reamed when I finally found a secretary to help me find my place in the schedule.
Instead, she was lovely. Everyone was lovely. The fact that I’d missed a portion of the events wasn’t a problem at all. I was given the necessary information to make it to where I wanted to be next—not where I had to be, where I wanted to be—and left to my own devices. It was such a change from the micromanaging, grueling, and thankless work back in NYC that—I can not tell a lie—I teared up a bit. If I hadn’t already made the choice to come here, that would have done it.
Of course my case was a bit of an anomaly. But I can’t stress enough that what made the difference between the horrible work environment I was coming from and the one here is what still makes the University of Michigan the best option: these people are lovely.
I’m not just talking about the staff or even the faculty. I’m talking also about my fellow students. I’m talking about the fact that these people are clever—the faculty has people from the top of their field in so many departments and the students get tenure track jobs in prominent, well-regarded universities all the time. I’m talking about how these people are kind and brave—that our GEO union is one of the strongest graduate student unions in the country and that only happens because our administration knows the worth of a good union. I’m talking about the fact that this university prides itself on its friendliness.
And that has made all the difference to me.
Published in: Student Voices