Ph.D. / R.I.P.

As many of you know, I've spent the last six years working towards my Ph.D., completing my coursework, passing comps, even slogging through most of my dissertation research. Well, as of next week, it's all been for naught. I have officially withdrawn from my program. The past year and a half have made this decision pretty easy: lots of exciting playwriting/screenwriting opportunities, a move half-way across the country far away from my research and adviser, not to mention baby; and yet there's a little bittersweetness as with all good-byes.

So here stands my fond farewell to being a graduate student: goodbye long hours and low pay; good-bye bitch sessions in student housing; good-bye to that yummy, musty library smell; good-bye footnotes; good-bye M.L.A. Good-bye archives, microfilm, and checking your ballpoint pens at the door. Good-bye professors one and all--the great, the good, and the good for nothings. But most of all, good-bye to college campuses in the fall. Nothing makes me feel more at home than your breezy, leafy quads, an empty notebook grasped in my eager hand and a pencil behind the ear.

Farewell.