I’m In! – The Right Fit

On August 6, an email from William & Mary arrived with the word I had been waiting for: accepted.

I had been accepted to graduate school before. Three times, in fact. Arizona State University had admitted me to three different graduate programs at different points in my life. Each acceptance felt good. Each offered the possibility of becoming something I wasn’t quite sure I was yet.

This one felt different.

There was no imposter syndrome. I didn’t feel I was trying to be someone I am not. More surprisingly, I didn’t reconsider my decision. In the past, acceptance had sometimes reopened the question I thought the application had answered: Now that I can actually go, do I really want to?

Not this time.

Within a day, I had accepted the offer, activated my student access and ordered three official college transcripts. These were mundane administrative tasks, but my reaction to them wasn’t mundane. I wasn’t investigating another possible future. I was preparing for one.

And yet, in a conversation with my wife, I found myself trying to explain why this acceptance carried a weight the others had not.

Giving Up Intellectual Sovereignty

For the first time, going to graduate school felt as though I was giving something up.

For much of the past eighteen months, I have been writing. Week after week, essay after essay, I have followed questions because I wanted to know where they led. Education led to technology. Technology led to artificial intelligence and human judgment. Questions about judgment led to decision-making under uncertainty. Neurotechnology brought me into questions about cognitive liberty, mental privacy, ethics, public policy and law.

No professor assigned those topics. No syllabus connected them for me. There were dead ends and unexpected turns, but the direction was mine.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being simply something I did. It became my identity.

That is what I did not have when those earlier graduate-school acceptances arrived. Back then, I looked toward graduate school partly to provide direction. A program might help me discover what I wanted to do next and, perhaps, who I wanted to become.

William & Mary arrived after I had begun answering those questions for myself.

That meant something now existed on the other side of the decision.

A professor will choose some of what I read. A syllabus will determine where some of my attention goes. Assignments and deadlines will replace some of the freedom I have enjoyed following whatever question happens to capture my interest. After eighteen months of deciding for myself what deserves my attention, I have developed a taste for that intellectual sovereignty.

So why willingly surrender any of it?

Because William & Mary offers something I value enough to make the surrender worthwhile.

Make Me Better at What I Already Want to Do

When I looked through the course sequence for the Master of Legal Studies – Law and Emerging Technologies Concentration, I noticed myself having essentially the same reaction to course after course:

This class will make me better at what I want to do.

The distinction matters.

Not help me figure out what I want to do.

Not give me something to do.

Make me better at what I already want to do.

The writing of the past eighteen months has also left me with a record of my interests. When I am asked to select a topic to research, I won’t have to manufacture one. The questions are already there: artificial intelligence and human judgment, decision-making under uncertainty, neurotechnology and cognitive liberty, and the growing distance between technological capability and the legal and ethical frameworks meant to govern it.

William & Mary does not have to create those interests. It can deepen them.

Surrender vs. Partnership

That is when what initially felt like a surrender of sovereignty began to look more like a partnership.

I will give William & Mary some influence over where my attention goes next. In return, professors, classmates, readings and ideas I haven’t encountered yet will challenge what I think I know. I will bring questions and interests developed through eighteen months of independent work, but I don’t expect to leave with those questions—or myself—unchanged.

If I do, I will have wasted my time.

I know enough about who I am and what interests me that I can willingly give another institution some influence over where I go next. I can arrive with my eyes wide open and my mind receptive to the possibility that some of my ideas will be strengthened, some complicated and others abandoned altogether.

That is the partnership I want.

William & Mary can respect where I am starting without pretending that is where I should finish.

The Answer Underneath the Answer

Perhaps that explains the certainty I felt after the acceptance arrived. A curt one-minute admissions phone call a few days earlier had shown me how badly I wanted to be part of this program. I wasn’t sure how to interpret the brevity of the call…Am I out?…Am I in? During the wait that followed, I tried to practice what I had come to call the Frankl Pause—leaving some space between what happens and the meaning I assign to it.

Then the answer arrived.

I’m in.

And almost immediately, I started sending transcripts.

Maybe that was the answer underneath the answer.

For once, the choice wasn’t between graduate school and an empty space. It was between two things that mattered to me: the intellectual life I have built for myself and a graduate program I believe can make that life richer.

I don’t need William & Mary to tell me who I am.

I trust it enough to let it influence who I become.

That may be what the right fit feels like. It doesn’t give you an identity. It respects the one you bring with you.