scribblefutz

I wouldn't have suggested that, because that's not what happened! (Nor are they random; I know both of them.) Both suggested I not write a sample from scratch. This post wasn't about my achievement, which is why I didn't mention it. Intellectually I'll be fine if I have to write a sample from scratch, it's just a massive investment (four months at least), on top of everything else.

I'm chatting with professors and current graduate students about this question, and I figured I'd float it here, too. I've written analysis, op-eds, and longform stories for newspapers and magazines. Some of that work I'm quite proud of, and a few folks in the academy (a sociology PhD candidate at UCLA, and a prof who got his PhD from Berkeley) seemed to think I should use my finer work as as a writing sample. Would I be a fool to follow their advice? I did well for myself in undergrad, where I studied philosophy and virtually nothing else. My most substantial work—a senior thesis that won highest honors (and yet looks atrocious now, having revisited it to much disappointment)—is utterly unmoored from history and its social formations. Not the sort of thing I would like to submit as a sign of my interest or capability. I really do think I am stuck between drafting a writing sample from scratch, and submitting journalistic work. If I take the latter route, I do have a piece in mind, one that relied on about 20 interviews, dozens of pages of internal records won through a FOIA request, and a relatively small amount of original textual research, mostly in IRS filings. I'd be grateful for anyone's advice. I feel utterly lost (shocker).