As many of you know I have spent the last few years relentlessly applying to graduate programs, both MA and PhD. I have recently been accepted to the University of West Georgia and the University of Dallas for their psychology MA programs. However, this road has not always been so cleanly apparent and certainly has contained may toils and tribulations. I would like to dedicate this blog post (an possibly others) to the process that has lead up to this moment.
I first made the decision to apply to graduate school during my junior year at Mac Murray College (2008-2009). My reason for this was that I did not feel that after completing my Bachelor's Degree that I would have reached my academic zenith and could still push myself further and be competitive and productive at a graduate level. At the time my interest in psychology had been put on the back burner. One of my two majors was Criminal Justice. This was taken on for its practical job application. That is, there is always a need for more police officers, for example. This was in contrast to my "idealist" interest in philosophy. However, graduate school presented a realistic option to further my future and still be active in a philosophical setting. The most obvious career choice for a philosophy graduate student would be to teach. And so this became my focus. I wanted to go to graduate school for a PhD in philosophy and ultimately find a career teaching at the college level.
So it began. I applied for my first round of graduate programs seeking a PhD in philosophy, hoping to start my graduate studies in the fall of 2010. My application process began during the 2009-2010 school year. I researched what I thought were the best philosophy programs in the country that offered a PhD. in philosophy and also programs that I might be interested in. I went through the grind of preparing for the nightmare known as the Graduate Record Exam (GRE - kind of like and ACT/SAT for graduate school) and scored what (on that scoring model) was slightly above average. I contacted a few professors from various programs to the likes of which I had applied, and even shelled out the sometimes hefty application fees. I had applied to approximately 4 PhD. programs and was accepted to none of them. My heart was broken. I could not fathom why I had been denied admission. A few of the PhD. programs I had applied to offered a waived application fee to their Master's program. However, there were (I believe) two of these such programs, both of which were of no avail even after researching as far as housing options in the area.
After being denied application to graduate school I still continued my education at Mac Murray. I proceeded to graduate in May of 2010 with a Bachelor of Science degree double majoring in A) Philosophy/Religion and B) Criminal Justice; and minoring in Psychology. Where did this land me? Unemployed. Wonderfull. I had no job and was >20,000 dollars in debt. My parents who kindly supplied support while in school said; "now that you're graduated, here is the debt we acquired while you were in school." This led to me a troublesome yet enlightening time. After graduating college is when I began to train Mixed Martial Arts, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai Kick Boxing, and Boxing at Peoria Athletic Club. There is something majestic about combat sports that seem to draw the down and out. Training became something I looked forward to each and every day because, in the simplest terms, it was all I had to do to pass the time. I managed to make ends meet by collecting a whopping $67 per week from unemployment and by donating plasma twice per week to the tune of about $50 per week.
I spent nearly 12 months unemployed, and managed to save enough money for a second round of graduate school applications. The time had come to make the decision to apply to schools that I "thought I could get into" rather than those that I, then, "dreamed of" attending. However, much to my dismay this landed me in the exact same spot. Rejected, from all of them. This led me to somewhat of a crisis. I was unemployed, had bills to pay, loans I owed, crushed plans for further education, and had absolutely no idea where my future would lead. However, as mentioned earlier I was still a competitive fighter. Fighters are trained to be great, but the fighting spirit is something that no one can take away, or give you. You have to earn it all on your own. February 2011 marked my amateur Mixed Martial Arts debut in which I won via submission in the first round. Perhaps there was a bit of light at the end of the tunnel or at least a glimpse of success amid a learned helplessness.
During the unemployed era of my life there was a slight upside to this stage. I have always enjoyed reading but never "had the time" to just sit around with a book. When you are unemployed and make your bread from plasma donations (a notoriously long process) you have all the time in the world to read as many books as you desire that you never thought you had time for. This lead me to start to rekindle my interest in psychology. I moved from reading my staple of heavy, high-end, philosophy texts, to a few books on body language, to mentalism, to psychiatry. I do not recall what led me to the choice, but Irvin Yalom's book "Staring at the Sun" has to be the catalyst of my career that completely captivated and revitalized my vision. This topic will be elaborated later. It was during my junior year at Mac Murray college while reading Kant's critiques that I had a bit of a revelation. Kant's works are infamously difficult to read, however, if you can wade through the complicated syntax it makes a lot of sense to apply to every day life. The irony is that your average, everyday Joe would just assume have teeth pulled thank attempt to digest "The Critique of Pure Reason." This gave birth to the career goal of wanting to teach philosophy as a means of bringing philosophy out of the ivory tower of academia and back into the hands of the layman, where it began in the days of Aristotle and Plato. Now, back to the present time in my story...
In April of 2011 I began working as a Security Officer at OSF St. Francis Medical Center. Earlier I mentioned "Staring at the Sun" by Irving D. Yalom. Yalom is a forerunner in the field of existential psychotherapy. This philosophical approach to humanistic psychology and therapy was pioneered by the likes of Rollo May and Carl Rogers. What was so awakening about Yalom's book was that it revealed to me a more apt facet for my goal of redistributing philosophy's wisdom to the masses, and that facet was through psychotherapy. Having a renewed interest in Psychology, I immediately made contact and friends with the mental health personnel at St. Francis. Some of these persons provided me great insight into career options as a therapist as well as be the writers of future letters of recommendation. After some careful thought I decided that my career of choice would shift from being a teacher to being a psychiatrist. This of course entails medical school, but would avoid the "red tape" of medications involved in the web of mental health professionals. As my degree from Mac Murray had steered me away from physical science I enrolled at a community college, Illinois Central, to embark on the pre-requisite courses I would need to attend medical school. I knew going in that this course of action would be anything but sunshine and rainbows, but I had never imagined the hell-bent toll that would ensue.
My life in the Fall of 2011 consisted of working full time at St. Francis as well as a part-time job teaching boxing and jiu jitsu lessons, and taking a full course load of pre-medical college classes. To make a long story short, I spent about ten weeks getting about three hours of sleep, seven days per week. Needless to say I burnt out. I was like a dying sun. When a star, such as the Milky Way's sun, dies, it first expands to great lengths and consumes everything in its bath only to explode into vast nothingness. With the courses paid for and the semester two thirds finished I made the difficult decision to withdraw from my classes and abandon the dream of doctoring. The reasons was quite simple at its roots. I wanted the focus of my career and studies to be on therapy not medicine. The roles are reversed as a psychiatrist is a doctor first and a therapist second. While I was interested in medicine, the time and money investment required of a medical student far outweighed my interest. Everyone knows that the >100,000 dollar tab and 10 years of study in medical school is anything but a weekend-warrior project.
It became clear to me that my education at Mac Murray had not misled me. There was distinct purpose to me having been drawn to liberal arts and humanities rather than physical science. A began to compile a third round of graduate school application, this time focusing on psychology departments. This was a bit of a stretch considering that I only had a minor in psychology. However, the equalizer was that I was seeking out programs that focused on humanistic, phenomenological, and transpersonal aspects of psychology in order to make the best use of my philosophy degree. The difference this time around was that rather than apply to schools that were "ranked" highly, I diligently searched for and researched programs and and faculty members who shared my vision and ambition. Another major change was the ways in which I contacted faculty members of the universities I planned on applying to. Previously, I reached out to them with a token inquiry about the school and program and in return received a token, tongue-and-cheek response. During this round of applications I researched each faculty member I planned on contacting. I researched projects they had done, their research interests, their biographies, where they had previously taught, where they had received their education, literally Googled everything I could find out about them. This lead to a much more involved email exchange, some of which even resulted in faculty members granting me a telephone conference in which I interviewed them about the schools, their research interests, and research interests of my own. Various parts of those interviews were also used in the research project I conducted titled "Benevolence of a Stranger: What Albert Camus' 'The Stranger' Teaches Us About Ourselves" which was submitted as a writing sample along with my graduate applications.
Alas, my future was taking shape. Rather than taking a shot in the dark at graduate school everything felt right about this round of applications. The proverbial "grind" had become a way of life for me and rejection from universities was almost expected. I was once caught in the cyclic redundancy of scraping together meager funds for applications, anxiously awaiting a response, and ultimately being rejected, only to rinse and repeat for three years. Things were different for this third set of applications. As I mentioned, the fit was "right" and that is the best way I can describe it. There was nothing that did not seem to be perfect between the relationship I had with the universities I was applying to. I did take a bit of a gamble by flying into Atlanta to interview with two faculty members of the University of West Georgia. I thought the interview went fairly well and while I really conversed well with one of the faculty members, I was unsure of my impression on the other. The following morning I awoke with the intention of sending "thank you" emails to my interviewers when I noticed I had a new message from their secretary. Still half asleep I did not bother to read the one line of text, but clicked to open the first of six attachments to the email. It was a letter of acceptance to the university! I was truly beside myself. So much so that I could not yet immediately tell the world via Facebook because my hands were shaking too much to type. Then next day I also received a letter in the mail from the University of Dallas, nervously opened it, and found that I was also granted admission to that institution!
While my attendance commitment remains undecided I now have a future planned, a place to go, a career to flourish in, valuable lessons learned, and what many people only dream of; a completely fresh start and an opportunity to make your dreams a reality and live life exactly as you want it to be. I still wear a scar on my left arm from countless plasma donations to remind me of more difficulty and trying times. But those struggles were not without purpose. I choose to believe that I needed that rough patch to awaken me; to decide what exactly I wanted of myself, my education, and my career. This marks the end of this blog. No more posts will ever be contributed here. The description portrays the function of this blog which is to convey my post-undergraduate and pre-graduate philosophical and psychological musings. The time has come to move on. Frequent readers need not dismay as a new blog will be created to follow my journey through graduate school. This blog will remain in tact for archive purposes.
Sincerely signed,
Your resident neo-philosopher,
Austin P. Haedicke
