What dreams may come

Three hours of meetings scheduled with UNT professors on Tuesday. The professor that I've been corresponding with has been nothing but forthcoming so far, but I still don't really have any idea as to what I should be expecting when I get there, other than that I'm going to be sitting down with six professors, one after another, and hopefully selling myself to all of them, somehow. This isn't a formal thing, it's not part of the application process, the guy just offered it to me, which seems like a good thing. My understanding is that the standard grad school application process does NOT, impersonal as it is, include hob-knobbing with the professors prior to applying. However, because this isn't a standard part of the process, I'm not sure that the professors will necessarily know what to do either. My hope is that we'll all sit down and just kind of chat, I'll ask questions about the program and we'll strike up a fairly low-key, yet illuminating conversation. My fear is that I'm going to sit down to a professor staring out at me from behind a giant oak desk, just waiting for me to say something interesting. My other fear is that, out of a sense of near-debilitating desperation, I'll just go into a trance and start offering anything to whoever will guarantee my entry into the program. I just can't bear the thought of another year working at some bullshit job. *tags Ike in*