Relief never felt so goddamned relieving

This thing has very seriously been sitting on my desk/table since I originally mentioned it nearly two monthsago , although I'm pretty sure it did very little to motivate me. I've submitted my online applications and application fees; today I went to the post office twenty minutes before it closed to get my Penn State application stuff overnighted. Tomorrow I just have to take my Michigan envelopes to the post office and send them off. Next week I have to figure out why my boss hasn't submitted her online letter of recommendation yet, and then it will be smooth sailing until it's acceptance/rejection letter time in March or April. I can breathe again.

I have applied to the University of Michigan and the Pennsylvania State University because they are the only two schools in the country that offer joint Ph.D. programs in Psychology and Women's Studies. I was going to apply to a California school or two, but none of them were a good fit. Even Berkelely, the only UC to offer a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology, just didn't feel right. Their program is much more empirical-research-based and less practice-focused. I didn't get to apply to Wright State University like I had planned because I discovered, at the last minute, that they require the GRE Psychology Subject Test, which I have not taken (because I thought I had checked and that none of my schools required it). I have been considering applying to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln because they have a good program and because applying to three schools will make me feel better than applying to two, but I just don't feel as good about it as I do about Michigan and Penn. Do I really want to live in Nebraska? Could I be happy there? At this point, I seriously doubt the answer to either of those questions could ever be "yes" or even "maybe, sort of?".

So. The enormous weight that I have been carrying on my shoulders and in my stomach for over a year has been lifted, and it will have fallen off completely by December 5th, which is the later of the two deadlines. I just felt like writing this out. I'll refer back to this when I'm writing my tirades about getting in or not getting in to grad school, and I'll have a nice little chain of blog entries past to which I can link.

Also good news: all of my student loans have successfully been put into forbearance, at least while I'm doing AmeriCorps. Now I get to re-learn what it's like to live without the constant nagging pressure of worry and dread. I'm unbelievably excited for the holidays. Too excited to even criticize the Puritan assholes who founded this country.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!