Informational Interviews

I have been going on a lot of these lately. Monday was Judy Metro, editor in chief of the Gallery's Pubs department. she was v. nice, v. maternal, giving me advice on how to break into publishing with absolutely no experience. then yesterday i met with the director of the Corcoran. i had only ever seen his name in print, Greenhalgh, and i assumed it was an example of that weird british habit of dropping consonants from proper nouns. like how Leicester is pronounced lester. so i thought his name was pronounced grenhall, but it turns out it's actually green-halch. luckily his assistant corrected me in time, but the point is, who wants their last name to be green-halch?

however odd his name sounds, Mr. Greenhalgh himself was v. charming, a boyish-looking, energetic, middle-aged man who slouched so low in his chair i thought he might fall out. yet he was brisk and business-like, rattling off names of programs i could apply to and profs. i could work with. the best thing he said was that if i got a graduate degree in design history i would never be out of work. i am soon to be unemployed and i have a feeling it sucks.

then this morning i had a really great chat with a woman here at the gallery who did her graduate work in London at the Courtauld. she was really nice and made the program sound really nice, and more importantly she was v. frank and informative on how it works re: applying and funding.

so now i've been spending most of the afternoon looking at the profiles of faculty in the UK and trying to figure out how i would apply for a Fulbright. i'm liking this grad school in England idea more and more. i feel like doing that instead would make getting rejected this past year make more sense. whereas if i reapply to the same places in the States and get into a couple i'll just wonder all the more why the hell i didn't get accepted in the first place.

i feel like i've finally gotten over the rejection thing, but of course, every time i do think that i have another meltdown about it. maybe i just have to embrace the roller coaster, they are more exciting that level ground.