Applying to Grad School from Mali

If you don't know how to laugh about it the whole process would be incredibly frustrating. Internet is super slow (when it works), I don't have ready access to printers or scanners, and the power doesn't even stay on all the time. If my friends aren't home I can't get on the internet. Phone calls are super expensive and good connections are rare. I get distracted when my friends want to hang out (which is most of the time) - hard to say no when I know the village would not offer me such opportunities. On top of that, Peace Corps gives me a lot of crap for not being at site. All of these things make it difficult to get anything done. Good thing I only want to to apply to one school - The University of Michigan. Too bad they have to make their application insane.

Taking the GRE Saturday morning was an interesting experience. I hopped in a cab whose driver said he knew where the test center was. This made me happy since I had little idea. I ended up on a busy road somewhere near where I thought my destination should be, but I didn't see the signs for it anywhere. After asking a few people who had no idea I started to panic. While making frantic early morning wakeup calls to friends who might be able to get directions I stopped another cab driver who said he knew where it was. He took me around the corner, down a dirt road full of cows, and dropped me off in front of a building I never could have found myself that turned out to be the right place. Good thing I left a cushion.

The proctor was a pleasantly fat Malian who spoke a few words of English. He showed up late. The test booklets were severely lacking in the required answer sheets so it took half an hour to sort that out. Eventually, after a lengthy discussion on how the air conditioning (although at 9 a.m. it was already pushing 90) might negatively affect the girl sitting next to me with a cough that sounded like tubercliosis, to the sound of kids crying outside the windows, we started the big exam. The proctor left during each of the six sections, but for the second one he was gone for a bit too long. He came back ten minutes after we were supposed to stop writing and gave the five-minute warning followed by the statement: "I geeve extra time for evereebuddy."