Grad School Disasters (and Good News)

Applying to grad school has been one of those endlessly stressful things. I want to study English-language literary linguistics, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: studying literature through a linguistic perspective.

It turns out that if you are studying French or German or Spanish literary linguistics there are a bunch of programs, but if you want to specialize in English (simply because you don't know enough about those other languages) you have seven options for schools offering post-graduate degrees. And, inexplicably, four of them are in Nigeria. Seeing how Heather In Nigeria just sounds like a lot of a bad idea, I applied to the University of Nottingham and The University of Birmingham for a masters' degree, and the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) for a masters' of research degree and then to go straight into my PhD.

The University of Nottingham fake-accepted me the Tuesday before winter break, sending me an email essentially welcoming me as an international student, with information on how to get housing and visas and the like. 24 hours later, I received a second email which essentially read "Um. So. We screwed up... it's not necessarily that you're not accepted, it's that we just haven't finished processing your application yet. Sorry!" (Three weeks later they offered me scholarship opportunities, despite still not being actually accepted to their school.)

As you can imagine I now have little faith in the Acceptance Letter System.

And so today I go to check my email. I have two facebook notices and one Message from Faye Hammill, the director of the English department at Strathclyde:

"Dear Heather,
Thank you for your application for a place on our M Res degree. We are happy with the proposal and references, and two supervisors have agreed to work with you. However, we need a bit more documentation. At the moment, we have no copies of your qualifications. Please can you scan copies of your degree certificates and upload to your application [...] (if you cannot scan them, please put them in the post).
Thank you
Faye Hammill, Director of PG Research"

!!!

So I'm still not necessarily in per se... they still want my transcripts from first semester. And, seeing as how waiting to mail stuff is stressful...I need another copy of my transcript. Which, of course, is in Durham, and I am not.

CAN WE GO BACK TO SCHOOL NOW KTHANKSBYE.