Woe is Jeremy! As I write this, I am currently 0-for-2 in graduate school admissions … I am apparently very rejectable.
I suppose this shouldn't come as much of a shock to me. After all, you have to consider the number of times I've been slapped, beaten up by totally un-cool boyfriends and maced with both the spray and Medieval varieties. But somehow written rejections always hurt more. Maybe it's because they put the thought into it, maybe it's because it technically costs them money to tell me I suck (which means a singing telegram must really be the ultimate insult). The point is, applying to grad school sucks chicken ovaries. Sucks 'em clean.
I realized how horrible a process it was when I first started. It's not like applying to college, where you can fill out one application and send it to a dozen schools. Every school wants something different and nothing that you send will ever be good enough. Who wants to hear about me? I'm boring! I just assumed they'd rather hear about something interesting like a man with rockets for feet that can make women's panties unravel with his steely gaze. And so that's what I sent them. I refuse on principle to believe that that's why I've gotten two rejections and a job offer from Harlequin Publishing so far.
Maybe the problem doesn't lie with me. Maybe we're all expected to lie a little, like when you say you've been a good student on the SOFIs, or when you tell your partner you're on the pill as you listen to the unrelenting ticking of your biological clock. I suppose in hindsight my advice for you younglings is to tell graduate schools what they want to hear.
People love royalty and hate learning geography (sorry Dave Robertson) so perhaps you should include a brief statement in your application informing the admissions office that you are the last remaining heir of the Grand Duchy of Svetletoniaheim. You know Svetletoniaheim, it's up there between Lornadoone and Snickerdoodle.
Perhaps the best advice of all is to have a backup plan. Maybe yours will be a job or an internship. I don't want to give too much away, but you should probably hope I get into one of my other schools because my backup plan involves taking you all with me in a blaze of glory and Geneseo University Store chicken oil. Every time your chicken poppers are too dry, that's me hoarding grease for my fire.
I hope you've learned something from our little chat and can use my advice for your own applications assuming there are still graduate schools in the country that are not smoldering piles of ash and broken dreams. Or law schools, which are already like that but without the ash.