What's a Girl Have to Do to Get Into a Graduate Program?

My recent quibble with the National Disaster & Emergency Management University (NDEMU)'s independent study courses on the "soft skills" of leadership and influence, decision-making, and effective communication – that they weren't trauma-informed enough – has a solution: the Trauma Informed Emergency Management program at the University of Maine-Augusta.

Touted as the only program of its kind in the country, the graduate certificate and Master's degree offer four potential concentrations: Data Analytics, Community Resilience, Emergency Management and Preparedness, or Mental Health.

In addition to the core courses including topics like Natural Hazards and Human Risk Factors, Crisis Communication, and Research Issues and Data Literacy in Public Management, students can also opt for topics like Emergencies and Vulnerable Populations, Psychology of Disaster and Climate Change, and Individual, Family, and Community Resiliency among many others.

Naturally, this all moved the program to the top of my list. Yet unlike other emergency management graduate programs I looked at, this one required both a resume and a personal statement -- a 2-4 page essay on how I thought the program would fit my professional goals.

Taking the emotion out of personal disaster

I was very up front that I don't really have any goals at the moment, just because life has been so topsy turvy over the last few years, and I need "exploring" to be enough for the moment.

I whiffed, though, on explaining particulars.

On one level, I didn't know where I'd begin, much less how I'd explain without taking a lot more than 2-4 pages:

• The realization, after I first kicked my ex out, that I was totally on my own? I'd alienated most of both our families in doing so, and as is the case for so many divorcees, many of my friends turned out to be... not really friends. Learning to discern who was safe, from who might exploit my vulnerability, felt impossible.
• The upending of the career I'd built my life around? In some respects starting over felt like relief. But in others, I had no idea how to begin rebuilding. I'd burned out hard from writing for a living, not least because of the role trauma played in shaping the way I worked.
• Trying to extrapolate how any of this might have been compounded by a disaster of any kind? But then I'd run the risk of my privilege, including escaping unscathed from several disasters already, marring my experiences.

And then there was the idea of having to sort through all the complicated feelings of this time: the abject fear and the uncertainty and the determination and the way they all cycled and blended together.

So I stuck with what felt safe: my professional experiences that led me to emergency management, the incidents I'd experienced and the potential ones I wanted to learn how to plan for.

I tried to trust that my two pages was a more succinct reflection of my professional writing experience than the four pages I once would've overshot to achieve. I tried not to worry about the feedback I might receive about the level of detail I hadn't provided (after all, it wasn't like I was applying for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing).

A lesson in boundaries

As it turned out, none of that happened. The program director asked for an interview because she wanted to assess whether I'd be a good fit for the program. Being a good fit turned out not to be predicated on how much I bled on the page.

In turn, that turned out to be an important lesson in people having boundaries. In our age of online oversharing and trauma dumping, after years of fiction critiques demanding more authentic character development, suddenly someone wasn't asking for all the gory details.

Instead, I was recommended for acceptance into the program. I'll be starting in January, assuming something doesn't go drastically wrong with financial aid (hello, government shutdown) or some other variable (not for nothing am I seeking a degree in emergency management). Subscribe to stay tuned on how it goes!