Los principios

I started studying Spanish, like a lot of people, in 7^th grade.  My teacher was pretty horrible, and she was also my 8^th grade teacher.  I entered high school with a pretty poor grasp of the language, but I was fortunate to have two wonderful teachers for my freshman and sophomore years.  Things really began to click, and my sophomore year teacher was the first one to encourage me to go abroad, a year earlier than others in the program.  It was a summer exchange program, but at the time, it was expensive and my parents were not enamored with the idea of me going that far outside of the state much less the country.  I’m an only child, so I think that’s always made things more difficult.  I also remember not being super into the idea of travelling myself for whatever reason.  It just didn’t excite me at that point in time, but that would soon change.

I continued in Spanish for the rest of high school, and I was a strong student, but I remember how advanced all of the people were who did go abroad when they returned.  Because of my context, Spanish was essentially an academic pursuit, cloistered in the classroom, but the people who went abroad could actually use the language to communicate, to make jokes.  They could live in Spanish. 

One big breakthrough for me was discovering literature written in Spanish.  Literature is one of the biggest passions of my life, a passion that bloomed towards the end of high school as well.  I participated in the International Baccalaureate program in high school, and our final Spanish project involved an oral report that I did on Federico García Lorca, whom I had discovered through my reading of Ginsberg, specifically from “A Supermarket in California:”

            What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of        husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I remember two things about this oral report.  First, I kept pronouncing poesía (po-uh-see-ah) as something like (po-Asia).  Second, I was trying to express how Lorca, especially later in his violently shortened career, saw “drama as an avenue for social change and activism.”  I blanked super hard on “avenue.” I sat there, across from my teachers for a good 5 seconds of silence, the tape player running, trying to think of what the word would be.  I ended up trying to shove the awkward English-French cognate “avenue” pronounced with my already strange Spanish accent (see po-Asia), and kept going. Afterwards, my teacher told me manera was the word I was looking for.  So it goes.

I did well on the AP Spanish test at the end of high school, so I was able to take a 300 level Spanish Literature class the first semester of freshman year.  It was definitely a challenge, and a lot of the students had been abroad and spoke much more fluently/confidently than me.  But literature is my jam, so I was able to handle it well even if it was in another language, a language in which I was gaining facility fairly quickly.  Then came another literature class and then a Spanish linguistics course, which was notable because it is so far the only time where I’ve learned about a subject in which I’ve had no prior experience in a language besides my mother tongue. 

These three classes gave me enough credits for a Spanish minor, and so the second semester of my sophomore year, I started taking French, which I would continue for the rest of my undergrad career.  I started studying philosophy and came down with a very strong case of francophilia, from which I still haven’t recovered.  In retrospect, I really regret stopping Spanish.  I ended up with three majors in undergrad, and I wish that I would have dropped one of those (probably religious studies) and finished up Spanish.  But what’s done is done.  It was around the same time when I switched to French that I thought about going abroad for the first time.  I never seriously considered going for a semester, much less a year.  None of my friends were doing anything similar, and once again it was not viable from my parents’ perspective.  I did look at summer programs, 6 week programs, first in Barcelona and then in Paris. 

I received a decent sum of money from my aunt when I was probably 11 or 12, maybe younger.  She is very enthusiastic about Ireland, and ever since she gave me the money, kept encouraging/pushing me to travel, whether through directly mentioning the money or sending me Xmas gifts like passport wallets, long before I even had a passport.  So I had some money that I wanted to spend, but even the six week programs were fairly expensive for the amount of time you would be there.  I thought it was still doable, but then right when the application deadline was coming up in my sophomore year, my dad was let go from his job, right in the midst of the recession.  Any travel plans were then immediately taken off the table.

After that, I continued in school, wanting to travel but not really knowing exactly how to go about it.  I kept taking French, overall I ended up taking 5 semesters, ending up with a French literature class.  My claim to fame is that my prof wrote excellent travail on my 2 page essay that I wrote on the poem “Élévation” by Baudelaire which reads as such:

Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,

Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,

Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,

Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,

Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,

Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,

Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde

Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.

Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;

Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,

Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,

Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.

Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins

Qui chargent de leur poids l'existence brumeuse,

Heureux celui qui peut d'une aile vigoureuse

S'élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;

Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,

Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,

- Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort

Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!

I’ve always loved that last stanza, describing thoughts as larks that fly, close enough to life but separate enough from it to understand effortlessly the language of flowers and voiceless things. 

As I moved into my senior year, I didn’t really see that many options for myself.  It seemed at the time to either be a doctorate, law school, or just working a regular day job, either in a kitchen or elsewhere.  So given my proclivities, I decided to apply to PhD programs in English, which was a journey in its own right.  Applying to graduate programs is a lot more intensive than applying to colleges.  First, you have to have a solid and focused idea of what you want to do, what type of scholar you want to become.  I was not at all focused.  I hadn’t even (re)declared my English major until senior year.  I was in a theory class that semester, which I really enjoyed as a fusion between philosophy and literature, but I was still learning and absorbing new information and then trying to synthesize all of that into something coherent that would basically convince very smart people that I was also very smart and deserving of a lot of university resources.  You also have to research all of the professors at the universities to find out who you want to work with.  Ideally, you’re looking for a good “fit.”  On the other side of the fence, the department is looking for a good fit on their end, which for the most part, you have no idea what they’re thinking.  So if you’re not what they need that year, odds are that you are not going to get picked.

In the end, I wasn’t particularly convincing.  I applied to 4 programs (which if you’re doing it right you should probably apply to about 10 programs), and was rejected from all four PhD programs.  I was admitted into the University of Chicago MAPH program, which is a one year program that is interdisciplinary and the place where promising students go who aren’t quite up to snuff for the PhD.  It also costs about $55,000 for a year of school, plus living expenses in Chicago.  I was very fortunate to come out of undergrad with no debt, and I wasn’t too anxious to sink myself and my family into that sort of debt for a humanities degree, even if it is from Chicago. 

Luckily, I found out about a program through IU that was a co-terminal Master’s program, meaning that it would start during my undergraduate career and finish in one additional year, giving me a MA in English.  The English program at IU is in the top 25 in the country, and I was also able to pay in state tuition, which made it much more reasonable.  I graduated with my BA in May ’13, and I stayed in Bloomington another year and finished my MA in May ’14.  I got the tremendous opportunity to be a first year PhD student without being a first year PhD student.  I took all the same classes, got to be a part of the department, attend events, and I also participated in my first academic conference.  And yet, since it was only a year program, the “what next?” plagued me.  I knew that I didn’t want to go immediately into a PhD program.  While I made great strides in transforming myself into a viable scholar, I still wasn’t sure where I would fit best. 

Another possible future tract I saw was publishing.  I worked with the Indiana Review as an associate poetry editor during my year of graduate school, and I also worked for one of the literary magazines on campus.  The problem with publishing is that it requires you (more or less) to get an internship first, the vast majority of which are unpaid.  So while that is still my most likely option after I finish up in Spain, it’s still kind of a bummer to take an unpaid position when living in either NYC or other big cities. 

Then I found out about the auxiliares program.  I still had the travel bug, and it seemed like now was the best time to do something abroad, two degrees in hands, the majority of my friends away in other cities.  I first found out about CIEE through IU’s study abroad site.  It was listed under “Alternative Study Abroad Options.”  I had to get my passport, which involved me finding out that my birth certificate was apparently a fake, but then I was able to apply.  I was accepted, and I got my placement email as I was in the field house next to Assembly Hall, in my cap and gown, waiting to walk across the stage as a MA student.  I got my visa in mid August, quit my jobs, finished up my TEFL course practicum, got on the plane, and here I am!