An Epiphany

It was a balmy May morning, the morning I first knew for sure what I wanted to do with my life.  The sun was shining, beating down in fact, on the quadrangle between Dean Hall and the Administrative building where the Austin College graduation ceremony was always held.  I sat on a makeshift stage, with the rest of the choir, as the sound of bagpipes filled the air with "Scotland the Brave."  The pipers made their way down the center aisle, followed closely by a robed man carrying the school's official mace.  As the drone of pipes continued, dozens of academics, clad in robes and tassels and mortarboards, processed to their seats.  It was then, watching these academics in their academic garb, throwbacks to the universities of the medieval era, that I knew for sure: I wanted to be one of them, to join their ranks and follow in the procession of learned scholars.  This was perhaps my first moment of vocational certainty and it came not a moment too soon; for this was after all, my graduation day, and I would be going out into the real world all too soon.

On the morning of the aforementioned epiphany, I had, of course, already applied to and been accepted by a graduate school.  But my reasons for applying were not so much vocational as they were practical: the desire to remain near to my then-girlfriend, the need to keep my options open, and naturally, my desire to delay entry into the real world and, shudder, the workforce.  Graduate school, I surmised, would be a continuation of my undergraduate experience and would afford me the same intellectual and personal freedoms I had enjoyed in college.  By this point, after all, I had become accustomed to the academic lifestyle, and moreover, to the rhythm of life in the academy, with its courses and semesters and exams.  Graduate school was, therefore, a safe choice, if not a cheap one.

Whatever my initial motivations had been for applying to graduate school, whatever decisions I was trying to delay by extending my academic training for another three years, these rationalizations were all set aside and indeed co-opted by the new narrative that I constructed at the moment of my epiphany.  I saw my future in that procession, in those academic robes, and so at once my decision to go to graduate school was no longer simply a stalling tactic, but rather a step along the road to my eventual professorship.  And this felt good, and indeed, very adult, for I was no longer looking to preserve my past, but rather stepping boldly into my future, a future that I saw laid out before me in folding chairs on a grassy quad on that sunny spring day.