This is the story of one student's path to graduate school, from the initial curiosity about the subject through the application process.

As an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, I majored in history, and during my junior year I decided to spend a semester abroad. A course in Islamic History had particularly intrigued me, so I chose a program in Morocco. That decision would affect both my choices for graduate school and my eventual career.

My semester in Morocco was a life-changing experience, as this was my first time living overseas, and I became fascinated with the history and culture of Morocco. The semester culminated in a three-week intensive research project and paper, in which I focused on the lives of female carpet weavers in a small town in southern Morocco. When I returned to campus for my final year of college, I decided to write my senior thesis about Morocco, but I was dissatisfied with the tools of analysis I had at my disposal. I found myself longing to describe the culture I had experienced, and not an event from the past. Nonetheless, I managed to write an honors thesis about a group of expatriate writers who had formed a community in Morocco during the 1940s and 1950s.

I wanted to travel further, specifically in the Middle East, so I applied for several research fellowships at the end of my senior year. I was awarded a Watson fellowship to spend a year conducting research on Islamic mysticism in several countries in the region, including Egypt, Turkey and Morocco. During this year, I solidified my interest in the Islamic world, and I realized that I wanted a career that would allow me to continue to learn about these cultures that so fascinated me. I wanted to travel and write, I wanted to communicate with people in their own language, and most of all I wanted to show Americans the rich world that existed beyond the stereotypes of this misunderstood region.

With these aims in mind, I spent the next two years researching career options, while also writing and teaching. I enjoyed teaching high school, but I also wanted to conduct research and become a college-level instructor. I considered pursuing an advanced degree, but I was still not convinced that I wanted to continue my studies in history.

At the time, a good friend was in graduate school studying anthropology. Whenever I talked to her about what I had learned on my travels, she would suggest anthropological ethnographies for me to read. I enjoyed reading these ethnographies, many of which were about the Middle East, and I discovered that anthropologists, not historians, were accomplishing the type of work that I had vaguely envisioned doing. Cultural anthropology, with its tradition of conducting fieldwork and living among people from a different culture, seemed appealing.

I read everything I could get my hands on about anthropology, and I enrolled in an anthropology class at a local university. During that semester, I made the effort to work as closely as possible with the professor, not only so that she would write a recommendation for me, but also in order to receive her feedback about my work.

Most candidates for graduate school will have at least one area of their application about which they are not completely confident. My grades were acceptable, despite a lackluster freshman year, and my GRE scores were strong in English. My one major worry was that I had taken no classes in anthropology as an undergraduate. Therefore, I knew that my admissions essay would have to be very strong and convincing. The essay needed to justify why I wanted to pursue a PhD in a subject in which I had almost no formal training.

To begin, I asked other friends in graduate programs if I could look at their successful essays. After studying them, I tried to think of all the connections between my proposed graduate degree and my academic and work experiences. I discussed how my undergraduate major provided a strong foundation for my future studies by giving me knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture. Since my goals were to research and write about the Middle East, I realized that my extensive travel experiences had been anthropological. I capitalized upon this in the essay by describing my past research, but I emphasized that I had felt as if I lacked the tools to analyze my experiences – tools that formal study of anthropology could provide.

I also tried to present a clear plan of study for graduate school. Admissions committees in PhD programs, no matter the discipline, want to see that students have specific interests, and even better, an idea for a potential project. For anthropology, I also needed to show an interest in a particular theoretical area. I presented a project that allowed me to demonstrate my familiarity with important themes in the discipline of anthropology, connecting my own proposed work with some of the anthropological works I had read independently.

Finally, I researched the programs as carefully as I could. I skimmed books and articles written by the faculty and made the effort to explain why I wanted to work with particular professors.

I received both admission and funding to my first-choice program, as well as to a few others, and I began a PhD that has taken me six years to complete. Although I am now in the final year of my program, I researched other career options, including the possibility of working with the government or a non-profit organization. Finally, I ended up in academia, which I had sensed all along would be a good fit for me. I have just started a job as an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college, much like the one I attended. Although graduate school can be grueling at times, I am confident that I made the right choice, and that I have found a career that will enable me to continue doing what I love: learning about other cultures and imparting this love to others.