Last December, I along with hundreds of other aspiring art historians sent our graduate-school applications out into the void.  In the instant after clicking submit, I couldn’t help but wonder how few of us would actually succeed in forging careers as scholars. I felt a pang of solidarity with my competition – we hailed from diverse backgrounds yet sought to storm the same opaque gateways with similarly obsessed-over representations of our potential as scholars. We all imagined those representations passing through the fingers of mysterious committee-members, fated to be judged by the very scholars whose work we’d been studying and whose tenured professorships we hoped to one day possess.

With the anguished hours of compiling applications over, and left with nothing but automated confirmation emails, I began to process this temporary loss of control over my destiny. I felt both deflated and relieved. Now, the waiting began.  I told myself that as an aspiring academic, I’d better get used to waiting to hear about life-changing decisions made with similar degrees of opacity– for fellowships, journal articles, conference slots, book proposals, not to mention jobs, and so on. But as the months passed, my dread escalated, fueled by the anxiety of fellow applicants and the dismal economy I hoped not to have to face.

I knew that with waitlists, purgatory sometimes lasts until mid-April, tempting one to obsessively check email and the online forums for news. Luckily for me, in February one of my favorite programs offered me a spot with funding. A few days later, my “two body problem” was solved, when my partner received a similar offer from her top choice, a nearby institution.  This fall, we’ll begin our PhD programs simultaneously. 

So while I’m both excited and nervous about embarking on my academic career, I’m keenly aware that while I cleared this hurdle, it may only have been by a thin margin and with considerable luck. We’ll never know.  For me, unknowing is the essence of the whole affair, which is quite a way to start a career in the production of knowledge.