Dec 29 2008
Rubrics for comparison
If you are attempting to excel in a competitive field, it’s difficult not to compare yourself to your friends in that same field. My two buds and I have been exchanging personal statements for editing, the clincher here being that we’re all applying (for different temporal and regional specializations) to the same department of the same school. I wonder who will win? We are all pretty good. Professors like us. We have outside lives that indicate that we are young scholars of considerable promise. One of us is a demon at online Scrabble. Another of us reads Latin and Anglo-Norman French. Another of us was nominated to sit on an important search committee in our department. Who will it be? Will we all get in? Will we all get generous funding packages? Will one or more of us go home with a broken heart at the end of the day? Perhaps I don’t really want to know.
