Redemption a-go-go

After six years of successively failed experiments, a light miraculously appears at the end of the tunnel.  An interview in Germany - of all places - for admission into a seemingly reputable graduate school.  Suddenly, everything seems worth it - granted, I never thought it was not worth it, but sometimes the prospect of graduate school can seem a bit bleak.

The nature of a graduate student is generally that of Sisyphus.  Every day, we toil to push the same boulder up the same craggy slope, only to find on most days that we lose our footing and must start anew.  It ends up being like nothing we've ever experienced before.  If we ballpark the academic history of your average graduate student, it goes something like:

Top of class high school > Top of class college > "Why is nothing working?" graduate student

Now this is by no means a universal experience, but to those who do go through this phenomenon, it can be quite ground-shaking.  It makes you question your core value and whether all the people who said you could do this were in fact out of their minds.

Exacerbating the situation is the dogma that if you work hard, things will fall into place.  I recall so many frustrated conversations with my father trying to spur me onward by saying that maybe I just wasn't applying myself enough.  But in a field so akin to voodoo where we cannot see most of the mitigating factors contributing to the overall outcome, sometimes effort and tenacity just isn't enough.

So here I sit, with an unprecedented opportunity to get a change of scenery, a fresh start toward a goal which I'd ultimately love to achieve.  For the things I want to accomplish, more 'qualifications' are undoubtedly better than less.  And I could not be more thrilled at the possibility.