From Dragonfly: A Night's Sleep

For some reason, whenever I receive bad news, I have a cycle. At first, I react emotionally. I do not tend to have a lot of anger, but I have a million emotions and thoughts going through my brain. I always reach out to others to discuss this and I also wrote here about all those thoughts.

Then, I go to sleep. I almost always wake up way too early after a bad news day, with stress and thoughts on my mind. This morning, I was awake by 4 a.m. Falling back asleep is useless, as my brain almost always has an answer, or at least a plan. Today, I woke up and knew my next steps.

I am going to respond to the letter I received yesterday. I am going to concentrate specifically on their charge of my not including a former employer on my resume for admission. I am going to point out that over the 8 year period of 2000-2008, I never worked just one job. In fact, I worked in non-profits as a consultant and/or employee with over 60 non-profits, including during the time I worked at the employment in question. I did not include all these jobs. Instead, I lumped them together and was honest in describing my work over that period of time. The work was not relevant to my application for admission, really just a side-note, as the relevant work I had done was put separately and individually on the resume. Had the job been listed on my resume, it would not have affected my admission. The non-profit in question was not well known beyond the community I lived in. What got me in to my program was my other work, in the academic community, and my personal statement. All of which was true. I will speak of the work on recovery I did over the 2 1/2 years prior to my admission and how that prepared me to undertake the role of a graduate student. I will highlight my successes since starting at my school, showing that I was ready and capable for study and work. These are the truth and respond directly to the allegations.

I will offer to send a copy of my PSR, since they are sitting on my indictment. I will also offer to send a copy of my more than 30 letters of support that was provided to the judge in my sentencing, to show who I am as a person today.

That will be my proper response. I will write several drafts. I will fight for my place and my goals.