I've been writing my grad school essays. So far I've finished Berkeley's, which are 10 pages in total. The first one is about academic/professional experience/goals, and was basically an exercise in rummaging through my previous experiences, gauging their weight in my palm, rotating them under the light, giving them a sniff, keeping them or chucking them, and finally piecing them together into a ludicrously logical narrative on why I was born to do energy policy. The limit is 12,000 characters, and I've pruned it down to 11,987 (thank you, Word, for that button), but I still need to include why I want a Ph.D. instead of a Master's. With my remaining 13 characters, I can write "me Ph.D. yes!" but that's about it.

The second essay is trickier. It's the one about social/economic/cultural/academic/familial/personal/animal/vegetable/mineral challenges/opportunities/experiences, so, in a word, anything. I'm going with familial challenge, because it's the only hard thing I've really had to deal with that I didn't choose. It feels like a minefield of sounding messed up, too cold and formal, and like I'm asking for pity (shudder). I'm eternally grateful to Edith the French goat farm lady for basically telling me to put a sock in it, it happens to everybody, when I gave her my really-I'm-ok litany that college students seemed to need.

My Cultural Experience is Russia, so trying to show perspective and understanding without aligning myself with any politics I don't want to or coming across like I think I have my own little sociological petri dish. The question also asked how you cound contribute to diversity, so I was on the fence as to whether to trot out gender. I ended up doing it because the question so pointedly wanted me to. As I was writing it, I realized what I had to say was more substantial than I thought, but still I hate the idea of being cut slack.

Processing it all so minutely and reminding myself who I was in the States is showing pretty starkly how so much of what defined me back home draws only blank stares or polite interest here. I'm excited at the thought of reentry, but there's a little nagging fear that my world will have left me behind.