Guest Blog: How I Got Into Grad School (With a Full Ride, No Less)

[Editor: A very good friend of mine has recently started his first year of graduate school in a very good anthropology program. He asked if he could share his story on my blog and, despite the fact that I know he is a crass writer, I decided to oblige him. Let me disclaim two things: (1) His writing is usually much better than this; he must have been drunk. (2) These are not my opinions or statements. Without further ado, J. Anonymous' blogging debut:]

This story does not start with some memorable one liner like “All this happened, more or less” from Slaughterhouse-Five or “It was a pleasure to burn” from Fahrenheit 451, this story starts with my humble beginnings on a side street on the West Side of Cleveland and takes me to where I am today: reading a plethora of books to prepare for Graduate School in the Fall. Me, yes me, Graduate School.

Changing Our Minds

The Gateway District is where Progressive Field and the Quicken Loans Arena stand today, but until the 1940’s it was a residential and market district. Before the Jacobs brothers built Jacobs Field for the Cleveland Indians (currently Progressive Field), they called in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to do archaeological investigations. The materials that were excised from the lot went back to CMNH and hadn’t really been touched until 2000 when they were donated to Cleveland State University’s library (along with two other collections of historic artifacts). It sat there, dormant, until 2009 when the stewardship was passed on to someone who could put it use: the Department of Anthropology. And unfortunately, the collections came with very little documentation.