1. Why do you wish to continue your education beyond the present year?

I hope to continue my education beyond the present year because I am beginning to realize how much more I would like to learn. When I began my undergraduate studies, I only vaguely anticipated the number of books, the infinitude of ideas, the magnitude of creative urges that existed. Now that I have finally come to some awareness of what it means to be educated, I realize that I am not. Graduate study seems an opportunity to continue studying, but more profoundly, more independently, and with more direction than ever before. I have loved studying at Boston University, and have tried to make the fullest uses of the rich resources here. But leaving BU, leaving the United States, to study in Scotland would expose me to such an entirely new range of people and possibilities. I want to continue in my education because I cannot imagine discontinuing it, and more, because I have a singularly exciting opportunity before me. As my peers are preparing job applications and buying business suits, I want nothing more than to spend another few years in Scotland, learning about its tremendous tradition of scholarship and endeavor, and hoping to contribute something to such a tradition.

The past few years have been enriching beyond all expectations. Specifically, the classes in music, modern literature, and narrative nonfiction writing. These are the fields I am most interested in. My college years have allowed me to focus on a few specific fields, not to mention regions, of interest. My school work this academic year has been particularly influential in my decision to continue on next year as a post-graduate. I have been researching and writing a major thesis about modern American narrative nonfiction for my program of study here at Boston University. The process has been thrilling, simply put. Working independently, under the supervision of carefully-chosen advisors, has been at times frustrating, but more often enlightening, revealing my strengths and weaknesses both. I look forward to working on an MPHIL at the University of Glasgow because it will allow me to continue doing relatively independent work, in combination with more structured class work. I hope, also, that I may have the opportunity to continue on for the DPHIL in a narrower field. I have spent the fall semester here, reading some modern Scottish literature on my own. In spring, I will be taking an independent survey, of my own design, of modern Scottish literature and culture. If I am fortunate enough to attend the University of Glasgow, I will read for the MPHIL degree in Scottish Studies, a twelve-month course of study.

2. Why do you wish to study in Scotland?

In 1969, John McPhee left New Jersey to rediscover "his" Scotland, the island of Colonsay, where the McPhee clan once held sway. He writes about the relationship generations of Colonsay descendants today have with a tiny island they may never have seen. "Just the name…seems to set off in virtually all these people, who now live anywhere between the oceans, some sort of atavistic vibration, and all they really have in common is the panoptic gaze that will appear in their eyes at the mention of the word…"

My own experience "rediscovering" my remote ancestral relationship with Scotland has been as inexplicable, and enthralling. The renewal of my own relationship began long before I undertook the adventure of actually traveling there.

In sixth grade, Mrs. Darroch--my English teacher who was raised in Scotland--introduced me to what has become my own life's aspiration. She was a master storyteller. I went on to graduate from Macdonald High School, having been inducted into the school's proud honors society, the Macdonald Clan. My clan pin from that ceremony is carefully tucked away in a green box with a Burns quote on the lid. I wear it on special, cloudy days.

My family vacations to Nova Scotia steadfastly fixed the ideal of beauty in my mind: I can find no suitable substitute for rugged, wind and sea-swept landscapes. My love for the empty places, my admiration for the stoic's life of enduring hardship began with these childhood trips to New Scotland. Today, I sincerely pity those who spend vacations lolling upon palm-laden beaches, sipping Planter's Punch, when they could be scrambling up damp mountainsides in Scotland, in sweaty pursuit of the singular reward of a dram at the summit cairn.

Finally, my curiosity compounded and I was able to take off on an eight-week backpacking trek across the remotest, most mountainous parts of Scotland this past summer with a journal for company. There, I discovered long-buried national and emotional ties with Scotland. Asked to define in what way I felt myself of Scottish descent, I had a difficult time. Of course, the genealogy is concrete. In the same way, my American citizenship is concrete, although I spent most of my life living in Montreal, Quebec. I have enough sense of my "Scottishness" to want to live and study in Scotland. But I also have enough sense of what it is to be Canadian, and American to imagine that I can offer something. America owes Scotland a debt, as is obvious simply after reading John Muir. I'd like to begin repaying a portion of that debt.

On my way west in Scotland this summer, I was fortunate enough to meet with Professor William Gifford, who heads the Scottish Studies program at the University of Glasgow. He was encouraging, and excited about my proposal.

My own gaze now becomes "panoptic" at the sight of a map of Scotland; there is not a corner of it I don't want to study and explore. Enthused beyond all practical measure, I promptly founded a Scottish Hillwalking Club here at Boston University. In the meantime, a Burns verse, a Muriel Spark novel, a Tannahill Weavers reel, a column about Scotland in the Wall Street Journal, or a 3x5 photo of a 3400-foot Munro all set up "atavistic vibrations" deep within me. Vibrations from the genes of my Boak ancestors, though long dormant in my immediate family, are very much alive in me.

I hope to learn about the reality of Scotland, as well as the myth and mystery so much a part of its national identity. The Scottish Studies Program at Glasgow, with its warmth and enthusiasm, seems the ideal place to realize such a desire.

I am interested in the Glasgow revival, as well as the Gaelic revival thriving on the Western Isles and the Highlands. I hope to continue my study, and practice of modern narrative nonfiction in Scotland. I am particularly interested in studying stories about the history and support of Scotland's environmental conservation movement. For example, I am interested in studying the life and work of John Muir, Gavin Maxwell, and other modern writers of their ilk.

If possible, I would also like to apply my background in classical music to writing about the Glasgow arts scene, and about the flowering of Scottish traditional music. Of course, to do any of this properly, I need some background in Scottish culture, literature and history. I am hoping to gain some of that in my independent study this spring semester. I am also applying to attend either the University of Edinburgh's Summer School program, through Beaver College (studying Scottish literature for six weeks this coming summer), or the Gaelic college of Skye's summer language and music programs. Either of these would help to prepare me for the MPHIL, and ultimately the DPHIL, degree in Scottish Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Ultimately, I would like to do nonfiction writing about various aspects of Scottish culture, as a narrative nonfiction author. In doing my thesis this year, which has involved a study of Mark Twain's writing, I came across this quote:

A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation but I think that that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its interior--its soul, its life, its speech, its thought. I think that knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way…absorption; years and years of unconscious absorption; of living it, indeed sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbinesses, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion, its adoration--of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of its national name…

--Mark Twain

This best exemplifies why I hope to attend Scotland's University of Glasgow as a post-graduate in the fall of 1998.