Personal Statement

Early in my second year at Yale I was a struggling swimmer on the junior varsity and one of the two sophomores on the Board of the Yale Daily News. It was becoming apparent that I could no longer swim while fulfilling my responsibilities on the paper. I arranged a meeting with my swim coach, Phil Moriarty, a sweet, sage, elderly gentleman. In that meeting Phil told me I had the potential to become a first-rate swimmer, and that while I would always be able to return to Fleet Street, the next three years were the extent of my opportunity in swimming. I do not regret the choice made. I did improve, and set school records, competed nationally and internationally, was elected team captain, and met some remarkable individuals who are still among my closest friends. My detour away from journalism was longer, however, than I could have imagined.

The predisposition of my late teens toward the school of life and away from the life of school was strengthened by the beery comradery of the athletic jungle, and it was not until my senior year that I again stumbled into scholastic interests, and was again led still farther away from journalism. That year I studied modern drama with Robert Brustein and American musical theatre with Sylvia Fine Kaye, and two contrasting theatrical worlds were opened to me by the two very brilliant and quite different teachers. I wanted to act, I wanted to read, I wanted to see, but most of all I wanted to write. Words and music.

I spent my first year after graduation in California coaching swimming (I may be the only graduate of Yale who learned a trade there), and attempting to write music to go with my words. That experience convinced me I did not have the musical genius to overcome a lack of formal compositional training. With no academic background in music, I was not allowed entrance into the U.C. Berkeley music department, so I audited classes there until I was accepted as a special student, which I remained for three years. In 1980 I ended my studies as an honor student in good standing after I had completed the composition sequence. Since that time I have written unproduced musicals, unpublished songs, composed incidental music for theatre productions, arranged scores for musicals, and coached and taught swimming.

My latest play is now in re-writes for a summer production by the Angels of Light, but this imminent fulfillment of a long-term dream has left me unfulfilled. I don't feel that the small audience reached in writing for the theatre completes my obligations to society, and it certainly does not offer me the personal contact I need. At the same time, I have decided to retire from teaching swimming to children and coaching them in competition, which has for the past ten years provided me with the vitality of society and the pride of service. Taking part in a process where children develop self-confidence and self-discipline, where they learn to set and achieve finite goals, where they make friends and grow stronger and healthier and happier seems no less valid a calling than it did. But after ten years, I feel I am no longer learning from it, and I feel my talents and energies are best utilized in another field. I've written down in a booklet what I have learned in those years,and take leave of a field whose wonderful qualities can no longer compensate for its lack of challenge.

I want journalism, with its stimulus of constant collection and evaluation of information, with its excitement and motivation of the deadline, with its comradery of the newsrooms, its intoxication of the written language, and above all its social utility so necessary to my self-esteem, to be my vocation. My eclectic pastiche of life in academia, athletics, and the arts is unlikely to give an editor assurance of my journalistic competence. And so, graduate school presents itself to me as a necessary step to work my way back into the profession of journalism, enabling me to recover and augment old skills. At the present time I am most interested in and most informed about the journalism of cultural affairs, but my peripatetic curiosity may well lead me elsewhere. For that reason it is important for me to enroll in a program that, like Berkeley's, offers ample latitude in whatever direction my interests may turn.

While it might give an editor pause, I believe my background bodes well for a successful completion of studies at Cal and a subsequent career in journalism. My transcript from Cal, the product of a more mature and focused personality than that which achieved an unremarkable G.P.A. at Yale, establishes my academic capability. In the twelve years since I diverged from the journalistic fast track I have maintained my facility with language. In that time I have also gained practice and theoretical knowledge in athletics, theatre, and music. Though I have always been at ease with people, the Felliniesque variety of the parents, swimmers, and coaches I have worked with in my coaching career has demanded still greater development of perception and flexibility in my interpersonal communication. More generally, I have matured and profited from the not so simple act of living these twelve years. I feel that it is this experience, both specific and otherwise, which makes me a candidate well-suited for admission to your Graduate School of Journalism.