Monday, March 10, 2008

Graduate School Update #1

Saturday afternoon, I discovered a voicemail from my dad on the phone. "Hi, Katie. Just thought I'd let you know that when I got the mail this morning, you had a letter from the University of Chicago. All of my attempts to read it through the envelope have failed, so I guess I'll just have to wait for you to open it until tomorrow."

Yesterday I opened it. It was a rejection. My mom was astonished I was okay with being rejected. (Let's just say: I discovered a long time ago that it's much easier to be rejected by establishments than it is to be rejected by people.) She wasn't astonished, however, to know that the letter was a rejection.

She'd been at a Family History conference when the letter came, but promptly found a way of reading it through the envelope on her return home.

As she pointed out, when it comes to such types of snooping, Dad is an amateur. And now I sort of want him to hide away the rest of the letters that come into the house so my mom doesn't know whether I'm accepted or rejected before I do.

4 comments:

Petra said...

Aw, boo. I'm sorry!

Katie said...

It's all good. I'm starting to lean more toward Portland, anyway. Of course, it's my mom's greatest wish that everyone but the U will reject me . . . :)

Thirdmango said...

You can open a letter using an iron by heating up the sticky stuff, taking out the letter, reading it, put it back in and somehow seal back up. I forget exactly how it's done but I did it a couple of times a couple years ago.

Katya said...

It used to be that a fat letter meant you were accepted and a thin letter meant you were rejected, because they had to stuff all of your registration paperwork into the fat letter. However, in this crazy digital world of ours, the letters are all thin. (Which had my mom hugely worried when I got my letter back from UIUC — the only place I'd applied — and it was just a single folded sheet.)