Toying with the idea of applying to graduate school (for an MFA in fiction or Masters in creative writing), I suddenly wish I’d taken my studies much more seriously. I never had a particularly terrible semester, and I never failed a course (although once, with formal logic, I came damn close), but I did sometimes stray from that magic number of a 3.0 GPA. Usually not a lot, but enough, in the long term. (I fared much better in upper-division courses and in my major, usually because those classes were easier and/or more interesting.)
Not that I need, or even truly want, to attend graduate school. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately. What I really wish I’d done as an undergraduate is secure an internship. A graduate degree could help me build a portfolio of stories that I could, conceivably, publish, but it would be most helpful in preparing me to teach, which is not something that interests me much. An internship, however, would have provided valuable hands-on experience, something that’s proved harder to get as I go along.
