By Marty Hershock
Finally, the application was ready to submit. I was really applying to the History PhD program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was really doing this!
My path to this day had been a long and circuitous one. As the first member of my working-class Detroit family to attend college (my mother was from a family of seventeen children and my father’s parents had immigrated to the United States from what became Poland early in the 20th century) I had struggled to navigate the vagaries and complexities of my undergraduate studies at UM-Dearborn. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined continuing my education at the graduate level (in fact, I was not even cognizant of what graduate education was) when I began my undergraduate career. That I had made it to UM-Dearborn was, actually, a bit of a miracle itself. Certainly, my parents and other members of my family knew about the existence of colleges (if only minimally, as a place where football was played) but attending university had never been presented as more than something to think about throughout my middle and high school years. I can honestly say that I did not know anyone (except for my family doctor) who had attended college. That changed when a young couple bought the house next door to ours. Mr. C was a University of Michigan trained accountant working at Ford. He was young, he liked to play football, baseball, and basketball with the neighborhood kids, and he was the first college graduate that I really came to know on a personal basis. It wasn’t long before he began taking my brother and I to sporting events in Ann Arbor. These trips always included time strolling around the Ann Arbor campus. I loved everything about those trips, and it was because of them that I started to think that maybe college was something I could consider. I wasn’t enthralled by the reality of what going to university was (as I had no clue) but was in love with the idea of the university.
The idea of college was one thing, putting myself in a position to gain admission and to actually succeed in my studies was altogether another. My high school—Redford Union, or RU High? as it was more commonly known—was not exactly known for its rigorous college preparatory curriculum or university preparation advising. Far more of my friends enrolled in shop classes than AP History or English and almost all of them intended to follow a well-worn path passed on from father to son for generations into area’s auto plants or various trades. That’s just how one did things. It had worked for our parents and grandparents why would we consider anything different? And so I set out to try to decipher the mysterious world of college. With only the vaguest sense of what I probably should take to gain admission to a university (I followed the lead of the smart kids except in math where I struggled to keep pace even with my peers in the middle of the bell curve). I was not a stellar student. I did not really understand how to study. I did not come from a world where academic success was highly valued (on the contrary, it made one different and thus “weird”) and I was far more interested in my television shows and sports than the material presented to me at school. Still, I somehow managed decent grades; generally, not A work—except in history—but good solid Bs and B+s. Somehow, I never really considered that this unspectacular academic record might not get me into UM-Ann Arbor. I wanted to go there and I pretty much thought that, because I wasn’t an abysmal failure in the classroom, that would be enough. Surprise, surprise, it was nowhere near enough and I did not gain admission to UM-Ann Arbor. Fortunately for me, because I had no idea that UM-Ann Arbor and UM-Dearborn were separate entities (other than requiring different applications) I had also applied to UM-D where I was admitted. I now realize how fortunate I am to have had my cards fall into place in just this way.
Working full time as I did, I knew that I would have to be careful about taking on too many courses in any given semester. I did know that there were some general education courses that I needed to take as this had been explained to me at orientation and so I plunged in and signed up for some of those. COMP was a requirement, so I took that. I had also been urged to take a particular MATH class by the person I spoke with at orientation and so I signed up for it. Little did I know that the MATH course that I was now enrolled in and paying for (along with a Physical Fitness course I was taking—surely you must need a gym class at some point), counted for nothing toward my actual degree requirements. I’d learn this lesson much later. My grades were mediocre, and I drifted through my courses without any real direction. I had no idea what I wanted to major in but, given that Mr. C had a nice life, I determined that maybe accounting or business was the way for me to go. I looked into that and learned that there were some specific courses that I needed to take, and that only after taking these could I apply for admission to the School of Management (Huh? Wasn’t I already a student at the university?). To qualify I had to take a series of courses ranging from Calculus and Economics, Accounting and Business Computing and to earn at least a B in them. Let’s do this! Except, I hated it; every bit of it. I found the courses uninteresting and (no offense to my COB peers) lacking a human element. Needless to say, my grades reflected my lack of interest—yes, I still have that D+ on my transcript along with a slew of Cs and C-s. Fortunately, however (and I mean this as I was seriously considering leaving the university), I had also enrolled in an elective history course that I had fallen in love with. I couldn’t wait to attend that class and to engage with the material that we were studying and the Professor—Donald Proctor—quickly began to complement my work and encourage my interest in the subject. Doctor Proctor’s impassioned storytelling and the links he traced between varied historical threads, along with his relaxed and impertinent classroom persona, drew me in. I was hooked and I eagerly became (in spite of my family’s incessant refrain of “what are you going to do with a history degree?”) a history major.
It was while studying history and working with the kind, thoughtful, encouraging and accessible history faculty (they really cared about me and my success) that the idea of graduate school first cropped up when I asked one of these faculty members “what would I need to do to become a history professor like you?” My understanding of their work was minimal but the idea of being able to share my love of history with others and to help guide students along their educational path, the way that I’d been guided, seemed like a dream job. To my surprise, as I never considered myself smart by any measure, my faculty mentors strongly encouraged me along this path and so, I began to think about earning a PhD (though I really had no clear understanding of what this entailed other than further study) in history and I began searching for potential programs to apply to. While I eagerly spoke to them about which programs to consider and about taking the GRE (Graduate Record Examination—I hate standardized tests) I did not think to ask about the actual application process, nor did anyone think to bring the topic up with me.
And so we’ve come full circle back to my application. I had done it! The application was in the mail and all I needed to do now was wait anxiously for an admissions decision. That wait time turned out to be crushingly short for me. Within a week of the application deadline, I received from Ann Arbor a postcard (not even a letter) rejecting my application. I was stunned. Not knowing what to do I turned back to my faculty mentors and embarrassingly shared the outcome. As they queried me about my application it became crystal clear that I had done virtually everything wrong. I doomed myself from the get-go. Not only was my GRE score on the low end of what Ann Arbor liked to see but I had: 1) written a truly sophomoric and unprofessional statement of purposes (“Standing on the battlefield at Gettysburg I realized how much I loved history”—today’s me cringes when I read it); 2) I did not sign the waivers on my requested letters of application (“It would be nice to read what my letter writers have to say about me”); AND, 3) at least one of those letters was written by my girlfriend’s (and soon to be wife’s) mother (“she knows me pretty well”). What an unmitigated disaster. No wonder I got the postcard treatment! Now what?
Rather than being ashamed of me, the faculty that I had come to know, trust, and dare I say love, rallied around me. To boost my GRE score before applying again, one faculty member recommended a Stanley Kaplan preparation course (he even paid for it for me); another coached me on my statement, and a third helped me to rethink my approach to the letters. They also steered me in the direction of Wayne State University’s history MA program as an opportunity to further build my skills and as a stepping stone to another application to Ann Arbor. In the end, this path eventually worked—another failed application before a third and finally successful one). The rest, to use the obvious pun, is history.
Looking back on this story with years of experience and perspective now in hand, I recognize the many obstacles and challenges that my being a first-generation college posed for me: the lack of experienced friends and family to turn to for guidance; the constant questions– “who did I think I was?” “who do you think you’re fooling?” “you’re doing what?” “how do I do this?”; the many signals I received suggesting that maybe I didn’t belong (the professor who took great glee in condescendingly correcting my incorrect pronunciation of the word paradigm—sorry, I wouldn’t have known a paradigm then if it had hit me over the head); the fear of asking questions (“you should know how to do this—look it up”) and looking stupid; the fear of failure; my family’s turning away from me as they felt that I’d no longer be interested in their mundane lives and activities; etc. All of these things and so many more made my educational path more difficult but they also made it incredibly rewarding. The first gen experience challenged me and forced me to be adaptable, to be empathetic and patient, and to be persistent. I’m well past that postcard now (though I still have it) and have accomplished many more things than I ever imagined (becoming a Dean? I didn’t even know what a Dean was when I started college) possible. I consider myself the luckiest person alive to have been able to return to my alma mater to practice the profession that I was first introduced to on this campus and to continue to work with students whose lives (albeit unfolding at a different historical epoch) mirror my own in so many ways!
