By Kayla Justice, English MA Student
Two years before the writing of this post I was working for a SCUBA diving company on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the thought of graduate school was non-existent. As is the case for many over-achieving undergraduate students, graduate school seemed like an inevitability someday, but upon my graduation in December 2015 I realized that I had no clear academic goals or direction to pursue, so the obvious solution was to teach SCUBA instead. To be clear, I loved my time on Kauai and teaching diving. Many of the people I met over the course of the two years I lived there remain important personal friends and I hope to go back to either Kauai or to professional diving, or perhaps both, at some point in the future. But the academic itch set in in spring 2017 and I knew I wanted to go back to school.