Fueled by a desire to become a teacher, Loren Mayshark entered Hunter College in 2008, with the intention of gaining a master's degree in two years. Six years and tens of thousands of dollars later, he abandoned his studies without attaining the deg...
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It was a letter of rejection from Boston University. Six letters of rejection would follow. Finally, one school said they would extend an invitation for me to take classes as a nonmatriculated student: Hunter College.
Essentially, my choice was made for me. Hunter did have some virtues that actually made me excited about the prospect of attending. It had a solid reputation as the finest of the City University of New York (CUNY) schools, and as a New York state resident I would pay in-state tuition which, I figured, would cost me in the neighborhood of $10,000 for my master's, almost unheard-of in this era when a single year of undergraduate college can cost more than $50,000.
It seemed to me that Hunter was an institution that allowed the individual student some intellectual latitude, and for a freethinker like me that prospect was very appealing. I applied for the program in Latin American history.
In preparation for school, my girlfriend Nora and I moved to Southold on the east end of Long Island in May 2008. I enrolled in my first class as a nonmatriculated student at Hunter in the fall semester of 2008. The class was Democracy and Development in Africa and Latin America. It was on a Tuesday, and I would take the Hampton Jitney from Southold at 11 a.m. and would not return from Manhattan until 11 p.m. My life was changing and I was doing my best to adapt. I was shocked at how different graduate school was from undergraduate, and how motivated I had become to do the work.
A few classes into the first semester I met with graduate advisor Professor Hannah Wallace (at Hunter a single advisor in the history department handles all of the graduate students) to make sure I was doing everything I could to gain matriculation. She was a straightforward and obviously erudite woman. Although she was somewhat curt with me, her demeanor made me feel calm because she seemed to be well informed on Hunter policy. As I sat in her corner office amid a clutter of books, she told me, "If you receive a B or better, all of your credits will transfer into the program, and if you are doing everything correctly, I think you should not have a problem getting in." I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling the tension in my chest melting. I felt that I had little to worry about and that every grade of B or better would be transferred into the program when I was accepted as a fully matriculated student. The coursework was difficult, as I'd expected, but after the reassuring meeting with Professor Wallace I thought that the administrative aspect would be simple. She made it seem that if I were to reapply after receiving such a grade it would only be a minor formality to enter the program.
At the appropriate time during the fall semester I applied for full matriculation, but was denied on the grounds of low GRE scores, which seemed odd to me because I had already taken a class and proved that I could do the work. This was puzzling, but I still had two more classes to take before I would be maxed out on my nonmatriculated credits. I thought that my performance would have made the GRE scores irrelevant, but what could I do except continue on the path that I had started?
I signed up for two more classes, the History of Modern Mexico (which was the only grad course offered in Latin American History that semester) and History and Memory, a course that piqued my curiosity. One cannot sign up for any graduate course without departmental permission. Professor Wallace granted me permission to continue.
I applied to Hunter for a second time while I was taking both of the classes. Both professors were brilliant and engaging, and demanded a great deal from their students. I worked hard in the classes and the semester was going fairly well. But in late April two astonishing things happened: I had to quit my job because my bosses were stealing from me and refused to compensate me fairly for the work I was doing. I was also diagnosed with spinal stenosis and it was recommended that I get immediate surgery or risk becoming a quadriplegic. I elected to have emergency surgery in mid-April of 2009.
