Love letter(s) to the Rhodes Committee

...Where academic pursuit is tied to personal passion, the application essay is simply a particularly well-reasoned love letter; writing for fellowships is an admission that in our passion, we hope beyond our expectations. The process can be difficult, confusing and painful: as candidates, we want to be understood on our own terms, a monumental task given the allotted thousand words. We are explaining fundamental, but still intricate and detailed, truths about ourselves, our ambitions, our dreams. We wonder: will they like us? If we acknowledge that we have, in a sense, fallen in love with academia, will they in turn agree that our passions and pursuits are important? Will they find what we’d like them to find, or read us another way?...

This meta-ramble somehow showed up in the middle of my Rhodes application essay today. It seemed particularly pertinent to me at the time, but I'm not sure how it ended up smack in the middle of a discussion about the effects of electoral system design upon women candidates and officeholders. It might be because of my recent sense that all this fellowship stuff is waaaaay too personal. For example, today I had a conversation with Emily about just how well we're all expected to know the people who write recommendations for us. The consensus seems to be, quite well. But what about people who do great work and don't really *need* office hours or long conversations or constant attention? It seems a little frightening to consider one's entire college career as a prelude to a time when somebody who should be satisfied with your good academic efforts will also decide whether and how much she likes you personally.

In any case, it's been quite a week. Bad meeting and good meeting on Tuesday, two good ones and a kind of marginal one on Thursday, neutral one and good one today...every time I come out of a meeting with one of my referees, I feel like a different person. Am I a slacker or an academic god? No...but my spot on the in-between spectrum is starting to be embarrassingly important. The goal, I suppose, is to learn to "place myself" independently--to decide with as little reference to others as possible where I stand and work from there. Because this process is good for me! Assuming I can listen to people who value my interests and not to people who aren't impressed with my GPA (GRRRRRRRRR...), I'll come out of this not necessarily with a scholarship but almost certainly with a better sense of who I am and what I'd like to do.

...And in the mean time, I'll continue my hymn to the wonders of Oxford. Wheeee....