Sometimes it feels like certain thoughts take over my brain. Not just in the typical, oh this is always on the back of my mind, way either. It’s more like this thought has brought a suitcase with it and is now maintaining a semi-permanent residence in the forefront of my brain.
That has been happening to me this week. According to the website of one of the graduate schools I applied to several months ago, I should have heard something from them in early January. As the start of this past week began the last half of January, thus moving us out of early January, I began to enter into panic mode.
You see, the school in question, was one of my top choices. It was the exact program I want to pursue, in an ideal location—seemingly perfect. But the panic from not hearing anything this week led me to do some math, which admittedly is something I almost never do. I crunched the numbers I found on their website from the average number of applications they get a semester and the number of people currently in the program and came up with a scary result: I had a 13% of getting into this school. What kind of odds are those? Not good ones. Not good ones at all.
Unfortunately, this did not stop me from compulsively checking my email to see if I had anything from the University (including my spam box just in case). Unfortunately, since the whole 13% chance thing entered my head, it was all I could think about. Each time I clicked on the little envelope icon at the bottom of my phone screen, something in my head said, “don’t bother. You only have a 13% chance after all.”
Apparently I should listen to the little voice in my head more often. At the end of the week after checking my email multiple times in the hour, I decided to send an email of my own to check up on my application. Within minutes I received a response; a response with bad news. Apparently 13 is, in fact, not a lucky number.
This revelation allowed a new thought to enter my brain, suitcases in hand. What if I wouldn’t have emailed them? Would I still be checking my email, waiting for a notification that was apparently never coming? Why didn’t I get a courtesy, “thanks, but no thanks letter? Here’s hoping that next week’s suitcase-carrying thought will be more pleasant. Hopefully involving kittens.
