When I was in Albania I decided I wasn’t in enough debt so I decided to study for a Ph.D. when I finished my Peace Corps service.

To do this I had the interesting joy of applying to graduate school from a developing country with a dodgy mail system. My mad plan, and some day I’ll go into full detail about how mad it was, involved getting a “regular” Ph.D. in a school with a strong creative writing program.

Somehow I managed to acquire applications and the money to pay for applying (see first paragraph about debt) and ended up applying to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) which had a good creative writing program that included the late, great Barry Hannah, a connection to William Faulkner and John Grisham’s plantation. To do this, though, I had to take both the ordinary GRE and the subject specific Literature in English GRE.

Luckily, one of the books I received from Norton Publishing was a college algebra book. I was therefore able to what I’d been unable to do at university: learn math above the basic level. This helped me do well on the ordinary GRE.

The Literature in English test was more difficult because it tested both breadth and depth of knowledge. Also, incorrect answers actually counted against my correct answers. At times it was better to not answer a question than to risk getting it wrong.  Luckily, I had an entire library from Norton to help me review.

Unfortunately, because I was in Albania, I had to take both tests on the same day. Since, at the time, both tests were about three hours long, I spent a long time in a chair filling in bubbles.

I ended up doing surprisingly well on the GRE, even in the math section, and did pretty well on the Literature in English. Luckily, I happened to be familiar with a couple of the works in the analysis section. I did worse in the part that had poetry conventions. “Is the following an example of iambic pentameter, sprung rhythm or boogie woogie do wop?” (Something like that. My choice, for the record, was F for “Who f@#king cares?” which means I didn’t answer it.)

At the end of the day, the entire world had five bubbles next to it and I found it difficult to answer a question without being tempted to choose D All of the Above or E None of the Above.

In the end I managed to pass both tests and was accepted to Ole Miss which was an interesting time of the kind you curse your enemies with.