I had a little teddy bear called Gordon the gopher. I took him to bed with me, he'd come to school with me cos he was my favourite.
I was a goth girl in high school. Perhaps the powdered white face and the black lipstick were not the most attractive. I felt fabulous at the time but looking back, uh, probably not the best idea.
I went to a very mean school and was bullied like crazy. I was a bit of a goth with purple hair, and I was also part of the drama group, which was filled with actors and writers and wasn't really accepted by the rest of the school.
In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs - so the pressure to do well is really high.
One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you're not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability.
I go to grad school at NYU, and I learn all these things about speech and voice and games. It's like camp for an actor, and I got a chance to immerse myself 12 to 14 hours a day in what I love.
I think, overall, there is a lack of diversity in the arts. I'm thinking about when I was in grad school: I could probably count on one hand the number of minority students in the graduate school program.
When I was a first-year in grad school, there were 18 of us in the Ph.D. program, and four of us were women.
My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.
When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting.
I went to grad school because I wanted to learn the rules so I would know how to break them. Breaking the rules is saying, 'I'm breaking in, OK? I'm breaking in your very comfortable little house over here, and I'm going to take a room.'
In grad school, I led a bit of a double life. I don't mean gender-wise - I just mean intellectually.
I went to NYU undergrad, then went to AFI for grad school.
I went to college, grad school. I got an M.B.A., had a really cush corporate job. But I was just bored stiff. I didn't fit that mold.
Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.
I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.
I wanted to go to grad school in philosophy... Nobody was like, 'You should!' You know, they were all like, 'you could?'
I wanted to go to grad school for philosophy, but I couldn't hack it in college, at least I couldn't at that level.
I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.
