rushthatspeaks | quick note

Oh, how much networking I have done. But it went reasonable well. I very much hit it off with one of the classics and one of the art history professors, and now know all the stuff about what program to apply to and what funding would be like and all that. All I can say is, it's a good thing I started this running around now, as my plans for next years classes are affected now that I've looked at the run of university requirements. Basically, I can apply to the Classics program, the History of Art and Architecture program, or both depending on the university (Harvard will let me; other places may not). I probably have a better shot at getting into your standard History of Art and Architecture program, but the Classics departments are probably doing things that are closer to what I want to do. If I decide to go for Classics, I need more Latin *badly*, as I really need to have taken at least one actual lit course at the college level, above and beyond syntax, or there is no hope. (Amusingly enough, the Harvard department we are talking about here is not general classics, but classical archaeology, for they will let me go study architecture *as well as* taking lit courses, instead of making me into a philologist.) For History of etc., I need to take at least one visual art history course, since I am overqualified on the architecture side but they do not separate art and architecture and I will need to have a passing familiarity with the other half of the department. I will also need to have taken a basic syntactical course in German, enough to be able to read it with a dictionary at my elbow.

I have two semesters and a summer left.

So at this point the goal is apply to both departments next fall at a whole lotta grad schools, praying for a Harvard acceptance, taking a German intensive over the summer in whatever city I wind up getting a job or internship (which may be Boston, as one of the professors in Harvard Classics is passing my resume around the fine arts department and I have hopes). Many German intensives start in July, which is doable. Next year I get four classes plus thesis each semester, and I submit as my writing samples my Cities thesis, which is first semester, and my Classics senior essay, which is also first semester and with which I will submit the list of things I will do to turn it into another thesis. One of my classes first semester next year had better be some kind of Latin literature, which I will try to place into by going back through all my old Latin books in the bits of the summer in which I am not taking German. This should be doable given where I left off with Latin and the number of people I know who can tutor me. Another class next year, which doesn't have to be first semester because they won't care as much about my grades, will be the art history.

No breaks from now on; my last long vacation will be the two weeks in Japan in May. From here on out it's a push to admissions, and if I collapse in aggravation at the sheer quantities of work I will do the even more aggravating and impossible and pick a department. I'll keep in touch with the Harvard professors, who will hopefully get to know me if I can run around here working over the summer. It's gonna be a bitch of a year, but it'll be worth it if I can get into a department that will let me do what I want to do and can get some nice happy funding.

In other news, the Webmistress of the House of Clocks has commissioned me and a few other people to provide content in areas other than the guestbook. I'm not getting paid, but Neil Gaiman reads it. My updates will be irregular, due to life intervening, but I anticipate having a great deal of fun.

Oh, and the anime Reign, which is the life of Alexander the Great, is brilliant and wonderful and magnificent and amazing and I cannot go on enough about how good this thing is, except that it has one of the worst opening sequences known to humanity.

The Scryed manga came out too and unfortunately really sucks.