[Izulde]

GRE scheduling will be done tonight and I'll likely take it in early April, giving me enough time to study, but before things get too crazy with end of semester work.

I'm going to make further inquiries with San Diego State about their MFA program to see if it's really just a publications sweatshop like its website seems, or if there really is an emphasis on creative writing, since the school works out in pretty much every other area I'm looking at.

If San Diego State does offer an actual creative writing emphasis, then it goes on the list along with the other three finalists of University of Florida, Purdue University, University of Arizona, and University of Oregon. I really, really want to go back to a Division I school. It's one of the things I miss most about Wyoming.

Thinking more about History and poking around with various searches, I realized that I wouldn't want to be confined to a specific historical period and even though I have the utmost contempt for literary criticism and its theories, I'd miss literature itself, so I've done a little more searching into that nebulous degree known as Area Studies, which, if I understand it correctly, focuses on the whole sweep of history, literature, culture, etc, but focused on a specific region in the world, which would be much more to my tastes.

My greatest interest in terms of geographical area is probably the Mediterranean Basin, particularly the intermingling and conflicts of a wide variety of cultures and peoples in the area that to my mind is really unlike any other area in the world. That the marketplace, given the current world climate, seems to be crying out especially for academics with Near Eastern knowledge (of which the Med. basin would include) is also a consideration.

A third factor is that while I have a fairly strong interest in learning more about othe regions of the world (the Far East in particular, where I have some knowledge of China and Japan), in terms of language acquistion, I have an extraordinarily difficult time grasping languages that use an alphabet other than that used in English (Roman, I want to say). Cyrillic was a headache and I'm not even going to get into character based languages. I had little trouble picking up German in my middle school and high school days and I suspect the same would be true with say, Spanish, Italian, Latin French, etc. (Greek might be a question mark, though I know the Greek alphabet thanks to my fraternity).

Of course, the questions then become the following:

1) Am I understanding the concept of Area Studies properly?
2) What universities offer a Mediterranean Studies masters degree?

From my searches, it appears that NYU and University of Louisville both offer the Med. Studies, but I'm not certain what other schools do.