Flashes of Panic

A list.

• No program will accept me.
• I’ll be accepted by a lot of programs and make a poor decision.
• I’ll ask all the wrong questions in the interviews (I did this in undergrad, but made a good decision in spite of myself.)
• I’ll want to go somewhere where the admissions standards are too high for me to meet.
• I’ll go somewhere where I can meet the admissions standards, and the program will be weak.
• I’ll go somewhere I don’t like living.
• I won’t go anywhere, and won’t like that.
• I’ll enter a Ph.D. program and hate it within two years.
• I’ll enter a masters program and wish I’d gone for the Ph.D.
• They’ll expect me to do nothing but research with no applications.
• They’ll just teach applications and never address theories and principles.
• It will eat my outside life (what little I have.)
• I’ll leave a good job and not be able to find any when I’m done.
• I’ll be qualified for dozens of jobs I’ll hate doing.
• I’ll talk myself into going when it may not be the right thing for me to do.
• I’ll be so bound up by the things I’m afraid of that I won’t make it happen at all.

Curiously, the one thing I’m not worried about is the value of the degree; I’ve seen plenty of job listings asking for an MS in Computer Science (“or BS and equivalent experience,” which I don’t have either—the BS, that is, since I studied Russian as an undergrad and got a BA.)

Now playing: Life Speeds Up from Hindsight by The Church