On Grad School:

I’ve been doing research on distinguished English graduate programs lately, since graduation is only a year and a half away.  The closer I am to ending my undergraduate studies at UNLV, the more excited I am to venture outside of this city… Vegas, in my mind, is like quick sand.  The desert draws you in, making it easy to stay put and quite possibly become stagnant.  I want to grow.  I can’t envision, nor will I tolerate myself living in subpar conditions for the rest of my life.  

Hear this: I will succeed.  This is why I intend on packing up and getting out of this town. I am a creature of comfort, reveling in stability and predictability, but I need some change once in a while to maintain interest.  Moving to another state will surely exhilarate me.  I can’t wait to be in a city with the old and the new melded together, which is why The University of Chicago is standing out to me amongst my grad school choices:

• Ours is a campus of contrasts and convergences: old and new, ancient and modern, historical and forward-looking. It is a place where both budding and seasoned scholars explore cutting-edge ideas and push against the frontiers of knowledge to seek new ways of understanding and changing the world.

  When you visit here, you’ll get a sense of these qualities in the gray stone and ivy-covered traditional English Gothic quadrangles juxtaposed with soaring contemporary structures designed by renowned architects such as Eero Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe.

  We invite you to stroll among the tall, old trees in the luscious botanic garden that is our 211-acre campus. Look up to see the playful grotesques and gargoyles that grace our buildings, many of which were put into place during the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

Juxtaposition at its best.  I envision myself studying Emerson and Wordsworth underneath the trees, basking in the grandeur of nature.  Skyscrapers, piers and sandy beaches in the same shot.  Can it get any better than this?!