School: March 2004 Archives

I just wrote a letter to the College Board, asking them to dig my AP test scores out of their archives and send them to CalPoly (because CalPoly wants them, and what CalPoly wants, CalPoly gets).

No kidding. I just paid a $25 archive fee for this. But it means I'm almost done sending transcripts (City College doesn't do mid-semester transscripts, so I have to wait until final grades are in to send them that one).

Now all I have to do is attend to the small matter of piling my portfolio into the car for the portfolio review in two weeks. I reserved a motel room for the night before (the wonderful Motel 6), so I'll drive down Thursday night, stay over, do the orientation and portfolio review Friday morning and afternoon, then drive back up so I can make it to my printing class on Saturday.

Then I'll be all set except for dealing with housing.

A big old NO from MIT.

A pity, but it would have been hard to convince myself to go there, even though it would be great, because of the expense and the complexity of moving half the household across the country for three years minus summers. Calpoly's a better deal all around.

So, Calpoly it is for the next three years. Wish me luck.

Columbia University: Si!

Not one I expected to get into. Interesting.

Yale School of Architecture: Nyet.

Actually, that's not true. Yale did not write me a rejection letter in Russian, as unbelievably cool as that would have been. No, they sent me a very sincere letter about how many candidates they have and how they hope I find a perfect school, but how they think it should be somewhere else.

UCB: No.

Not that I had such a stellar performance the last time I was there, so I don't blame them.

I somehow missed the envelope, but in yesterday's mail was another response from a graduate school.

Princeton: No. My first rejection! Not a huge surprise, as halfway through the application I realized that what I want to do and what they have to offer really didn't match up. But I still did it, anyway, because I'd started and it wouldn't hurt.

I got my acceptance from the University of Oregon today. Excellent program in sustainable architecture which would be really tempting if it didn't start in frickin JUNE instead of in September.

I had an extra hour today between photography lecture and the lab, so I dropped in at counselling to see if I could set up an appointment to get checked off as General Education certified (a ridiculous requirement, but one I will have to comply with if I go to CalPoly). The receptionist gave me a counsellor assignment, and I went to wait in the hall for him to be free.

Ahead of me, in the counsellor's office, was a woman who clearly did not get out much, and needed somebody to talk to. Anybody. She probably does this at home, with the toaster as an audience rather than a guidance counsellor. I sat there while she talked about how hard it was going back to school after having a baby, how she was managing this around her home life, how she wasn't sure which classes to take to get a degree in Fashion Merchandising, how she was concerned about how her daughter would react to her being away from home too much, how she thought she had to take all the required classes at once, rather than spaced out over several semesters....

I sat there, waiting to have a five minute chat, for more than half an hour. When I finally gave up and went to make an appointment for tomorrow, the receptionist was shocked that I had not gotten in to see the counsellor yet.

Seeing women go crazy like that after having a baby makes me ever so glad nature had other things in mind for me.

I got an e-mail from CalPoly today, telling me I've been accepted for the architecture program there!

Now I don't have to worry about whether I will get into a grad school somewhere. Ah!

This week at school:

A car where clearly the owner had run out of space on the rear-view mirror to hang crappy little Japanese cartoon dolls, so she'd hung them all over the ceiling, so they dangled around her head as she drove.