I Ghosted My Dream University

I still live in the Czech Republic. Something about the affordable cost of living, short work week, sustainable public transportation, and abundance of people who like me here has driven me to stay. In fact, I have signed on for a second year as an English teacher with the same company, setting this up as potentially the longest I’ve stayed in one place since my undergrad. Yes, I’ve been back to the States a couple of times, because I’m saddled (blessed?) with a family that wants to see me regularly, but doesn’t want to go through the trouble of getting passports. I genuinely enjoy living in Europe, which is why it came as such a surprise when I realized that I don’t want to stay in Europe.

Last month I was offered the opportunity to interview for a doctoral program at Charles University, one of the oldest continually functioning universities in Europe. This was the university that oversaw the study-abroad program I did during my undergrad, a program which launched my fascination with Slavic Europe six years ago. The prestige of this university alone would have guaranteed me continued academic success throughout my adulthood, and tuition would have been so affordable, I could have continued working as a part-time English teacher with no worries about paying for it. So how come, when it came time to come in for an interview, I simply dropped it? Was it nerves? Laziness? Some other unknowable emotion entirely?

The PhD program I was being considered for was a research program. In it, I would have spent years researching the history of Ukrainian theatre of the 1920s and 1930s. My end goal would have been to synthesize a seminal work of Ukrainian dramaturgy that would be easy to incorporate into American theatrical pedagogy. The way the program was structured, however, the end goal would not have been possible. Theatrical work needs to be tried and tested, not just researched, and a research program like that would not have given me access to the workshop-style academic environment I crave and require as I shape my goals and ambitions. But there’s more to it than that.

In May, I had the opportunity to fly back to the United States to attend a staged reading of a play titled Binding Prometheus: A Travesty in Three Acts at my alma mater, Susquehanna University. This script was selected by a student, Kirsten Weirich, who I’ve collaborated with before; she had read it the year before, become so enamored with it that she bullied the faculty into letting her stage it, and singlehandedly assembled a team to produce the play—albeit limitedly—with the time and budget constraints imposed by the department. They could only rehearse after all other department productions had wrapped, leaving them with just five days at the end of the semester—their finals week—to pull the piece together. The end result was a true labor of passion, with every story beat and emotional choice thoroughly considered by the actors, designers, and directors. As the playwright, I could not have been any prouder than I was at that performance. I always seem to miss the collaborative nature of theatre at the most inopportune times. When I, jetlagged, walked into the old university theatre I spent my formative years in as an artist and spoke with actors in the same space in life I was when I was a student there, I felt more than nostalgic. In a way, it was grounding. I know where I am in life, but where I want to be is nebulous at best and unattainable at worst.

Two weeks after that performance, I was back in the Czech Republic. Susquehanna University, as it did six years ago, sent a gaggle of undergrads into Prague and I, as a responsible and active alum, met them, traveled with them, and talked to them. It was sobering seeing young people in the same position I was in six years ago, stuck smack-dab as Americans in the middle of a cataclysmic Trump presidency idealizing the thought of going to Europe and staying and not quite realizing what would be left behind. I smiled and offered genuine advice for the bright-eyed undergrads asking, “How do I be you?” ignoring the fact that I, in their position, who locked away “PhD program at Charles University” in his ever-growing list of idyllic dreams, had just sobered myself to the realization that if I am to accomplish anything in the world, that list of idyllic dreams has got to be paired down at some point. My mother always wanted to be an astronaut. She also always wanted to be a mother, or so I’m told.

“I would live here,” I once said to the professor overseeing the Prague trip, a theatre historian who had been (and continues to be) a treasured mentor to me. “Not forever,” I had added, “maybe just for a year or two.” Six years later, she oversaw a new crop of bright-eyed undergrads as if nothing had changed. And yet a lot of things did. As I told her all about my career prospects and recent discoveries, and my life abroad, I think she found some pride in seeing me come to the very same realizations she told me I’d someday come to.