Apply to Graduate School from a Different Reality

By Jonathan Freeman

Graduate School applications are a challenge in any environment. For me, I am constantly plagued by questions of inadequacy. Are my scores high enough? (They never are and in my case, the scores tend to show that I am intelligent enough to sign my name and formulate a sentence any illusion that this essay may create to the contrary is purely fantasy). Are my essays coherent? Do I have a compelling application? (I have absolutely no idea what a "compelling application" looks like but given how many times I have heard admissions personnel use the phrase I assume its important). Finally, am I good enough to get someone else to pay for it? (Parents do not count since they almost always think we are good enough).

I have gone through all these issues and a few more since I am applying this year from Iraq. Yes, that’s me, a glutton for punishment. Not content to try applying to one of the most difficult competitive scholarships in the US, the Fulbright, and one of the most renowned universities in the world, University of Oxford, I must add to the challenge and apply from a war zone. To be fair, I really had not planned on doing it this way however, during the spring I realized I had to decide what I was planning to do after I redeployed. I decided that I wanted to finish up my graduate work with a doctorate, I already received a Masters’, and Oxford had been a goal for a long time.

Once deciding on my goal, I spread my information net far and wide talking to people and researching and here I met my first difficulty. I can only call people five days out of a week that only rarely do I know which day it is, despite having only seven choices and a watch with a little black box around the day of the week. I seem to have a unique ability to remember the questions I want to ask in the least opportune moments. Usually this translated in remembering that one REALLY important question in the shower. In this environment it ends up being a scene of me in gun turret watching the rear of our convoy for either a suicide bomber, a drive-by shooting, or just some idiot that cannot drive while writing with a Sharpie on a hand, arm, or whatever I can find while barreling down the road at 60 mph behind a really big machine gun that could in theory shoot 900 bullets in a minute. Yes, that is not a typo, 900 bullets a minute. Fortunately, I always have it on "safe" and am very careful about what I grab onto in the event my driver needs jerk the HMMV.

The next challenge has been occurring as I have been writing my proposal, now in its third draft with at least a dozen more to go. Fortunately, a good friend of mine, previously a Fulbright scholar, has agreed to help. After he read my first draft, he criticized, quite rightly, that it was an incoherent list of questions (I’m paraphrasing for him) that failed to be a clear study proposal. In his response to me he ask me a series of questions to help focus me on getting to the point. The first one, "what is the problem?" grabbed my attention.

In my normal (at least currently) realm of life I have a whole different set of answers for defining a problem. Has anyone I know gotten killed or hurt? What is the condition of our vehicles if we have to rollout immediately? Did I replace that used ammunition can? Did I ask about one of our noncommissioned officer’s R&R dates since his wife and he are about to have a baby? Are we going out to train the Iraqi unit today? If not, will that delay our schedule for their capabilities, thereby increasing the amount of time that US Forces need to be in Iraq? These are some of the few issues I deal with on a day to day basis, so when my friend asked me to describe "the problem" I wanted to study it struck me as a little funny because it was so far removed from my frame of reality.

That being said, people that I emailed have been wonderfully responsive but I suppose it’s not everyday that one gets an email with the subject: "Greeting from Iraq" in their mailbox.