graduate school | The Wandering Story Hunter

So I started writing this four days ago… apologies for the delay!

This has been quite the week! After leaving Boston on Monday I spent two and a half days in New York, took a bus to DC and spent approximately 36 hours there before busing to Knoxville, where I spent about 24 hours before finally taking a bus to Johnson City where I got picked up and taken to my final destination for the next month: Jonesborough!

While in New York, I had the opportunity both to visit NYU and also to attend the aforementioned “Artistic Review Day” at CUNY. I was seriously hoping to have a strong sense of where I want to go once I’d finished, but in fact I was more torn than ever after my visits. There are so many factors that make each program unique and wonderful, and it has been very hard to figure things out. Ultimately, however, I looked at the two curricula side-by-side and I realized that CUNY is just more what I’m looking for right now. The unfortunate thing is that I won’t find out if I’ve been accepted to CUNY for a few more weeks. I’ll keep you posted on what happens with that!

The Artistic Review Day was an exciting event. It was very small – there were only 6 prospective students in attendance that day (they will be doing several of these over the next few weeks). We began the day with a three-hour interactive workshop, in which we played several theatre games, many of which I’d never played before. These all built up until finally, for the last exercise, we split into two groups and created a piece based on a visual prompt, in which we were given instructions to consider a specific audience and create something that would raise questions for that audience. The interesting thing that came out of this for me was the way in which our piece ended up raising questions/awareness within myself. My group decided to gear our piece towards an audience like ourselves: people in the midst of making a big decision, taking a step forward into a next phase of life. Through performing this and asking myself what I was facing, I realized how much fear I have about what I’m doing and what I’m about to do, and yet at the same time how much I know that I need this.

As for the following few days, it was a whirlwind of DC, bus, Knoxville. I spent a wonderful Sunday at Sunday School and Feast with the Knoxville Baha’i Community before getting on the bus to Johnson City, where I was picked up by my hosts in Jonesborough. Enjoy the pictures below!