Last spring, I was a senior at New York University with an uncertain future. I had applied to five graduate programs and been wait-listed at both my first and second choices. I expected to receive a final decision by April 15, when the admitted students were required to accept or decline the offers. I could hardly sleep for days leading up to the deadline.
It wasn’t anticipation, though, that kept me awake. It was an unfamiliar hospital bed and nurses who bustled in and out of the room, checking my vital signs and adjusting my intravenous line. That’s because, in addition to being wait-listed at two universities, I have been on the waiting list for a new liver since January.
I was diagnosed with a rare and slowly progressive liver disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis, when I was 12 years old. For most of my life I have been asymptomatic, but I’ve experienced increasingly severe fatigue over the past few years. During my final semester at NYU, I missed more classes than I attended. My professors, for the most part, were eager to accommodate me, but there was only so much to be done. My fatigue was mental as well as physical, and there were days when just sitting up and holding a book was difficult. I had already submitted my graduate applications, and my need for a transplant wasn’t urgent at that point, but I often wondered if I would manage to graduate on time. It’s not easy to achieve passing grades with a failing liver.
A sudden fever, a bumpy taxi ride to the emergency room, and three days of testing were perhaps the only things that could have distracted me from the final days of the graduate-admissions process. For weeks I had been checking online forums. Reading hundreds of stories of rejection was both cathartic and a little daunting. I could access the Internet from my hospital room but didn’t do so often, as it required me to hold a keyboard in my lap, point it upward at the monitor across the room, and move the mouse with a sort of joystick, all without tugging at my IV.
A couple of days before the April 15 deadline, I decided to check my e-mail. I let out a little squeal when I saw a message from the director of graduate studies at my first-choice department, and my mom popped her head up from the reclining chair in the corner, where she had spent the past two nights. Such an e-mail felt too personal to read from a giant screen across the room, but I didn’t want to wait.
“Dear applicant,” I began aloud, “I am writing to inform you that, given your place on our waiting list, I would not be surprised if we are able to make you an admissions offer.” I stopped reading and looked expectantly at my mom. Cellphone in hand, she was already poised to update the rest of my family, just as she did with every piece of information we received from a doctor. I continued reading. “However, I would also not be surprised if we are unable to make you an offer.” She put her phone back down.
The effort that my top-choice institutions put forth to regularly update wait-listed students was reassuring, even when there was little to report. I was never told my exact position on either list. Still, the contacts in both departments were friendly and responsive, seemingly sensitive to the anxiety that many applicants feel about their futures. Senior year can be pretty terrifying, after all, since it culminates in the loss of friends, campus, lifestyle, and—in my case, anyway—a vital organ.
I envied the students who had plans to travel after graduation. I envied those who had any plans at all. I knew I wanted to continue my education, but I often questioned what to study. Philosophy was my undergraduate major. Its content comforted me and its practice engaged me when I felt sick and had little else to occupy my mind. A career in philosophy is competitive, though, and I didn’t know whether I would enjoy teaching. Clinical psychology, on the other hand, is something I’ve always imagined myself doing. Unfortunately, I found most of my psychology courses tedious.
After a series of Google searches, I had discovered many one-year master’s programs in Britain that offer courses in both philosophy and psychology. Those programs benefit students of both fields by bringing them together and affording them an opportunity to take classes in either discipline. I had chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, to apply to a master’s program in England and to one in Scotland, and I had received their acceptance letters after just a few weeks.
I wondered why no such programs were available in the United States but had no trouble imagining myself on the streets of London or settled into a castle somewhere in Edinburgh. Studying alongside philosophers and psychologists alike, most of whom would obviously be young men with accents, seemed ideal. For a while, whenever I found myself fretting about grades or my health, I would just close my eyes and think of England. Still, I tried not to put all of my eggs in one basket, so to speak, and Britain’s proverbial basket had a gaping, liver-shaped hole in it.
The three American programs I had applied to were not nearly as exciting as the ones abroad but were more practical. They offered financial support, easy access to my current doctors and hospitals, and closer proximity to my family. I was accepted to one of them in March. It was a program that I knew little about, located in the Midwest. I would have much preferred either of the other programs, which were in Boston and Atlanta.
I still had not received any news from those two when I was discharged from the hospital on the afternoon of April 15. I returned to my apartment, tired and covered in bruises from IV’s and blood tests. As I sat down to fill in my roommate about my hospital stay, my cellphone rang. “I don’t recognize the number,” I whispered, holding the phone out from my body as though the caller might be able to hear me before I answered.
In a flash, my roommate was up from the couch and running to get her laptop, yelling, “What’s the area code?”
“404! 404!” I yelled after her. My mind was racing. I knew it wasn’t a New York number, and it wasn’t Baltimore, where my family lives. But could it be my transplant center in DC?
My roommate pranced back into the room. “It’s Atlanta!”
The call was from the director of graduate studies, who informed me that I had been accepted. Just a few hours later, I received an offer via e-mail from the school in Boston. Both have master’s programs in philosophy. Given the uncertainty surrounding my health, I decided against studying psychology, in which I would begin a career no earlier than five years down the line. What would that amount to, anyway, if not more waiting?
I accepted the offer from the program in Atlanta. Boasting a specialized track in neurophilosophy, it is the closest thing I’ve found to the programs in Britain. In the meantime, my transplant process is progressing slowly. Because of the low supply of organs, and my relative health compared with other transplant candidates, I am unlikely to receive a new liver soon. So I am mulling other options, including a living donation and getting listed as a transplant candidate in multiple states.
Hoping for a healthy start to my graduate education, I’ve decided to defer my admission for a year.I feel lucky to have been accepted, but they’ll just have to wait.
