I got an email today from a Graduate Assistant at Berkeley. When I sent out that email to ask for an appeal, I guess she was the person it went to. I guess that original email denial came from her mailbox, which makes the whole process at Berkeley even more tacky. Thinking about it, being a Graduate Assistant must suck. You're basically a secretary/intern/general grunt, doing the dirty work and without any say in what you do. Only you don't get paid for it (at least not much) and the people you're working for are people that you also need to learn from. At least as a Research Assistant you get to do research and as a Teaching Assistant you get to teach. To think I may be putting myself through Graduate School by doing this.
That's one thing I'll really miss about working at InterExchange. There, I have so much freedom in what I get to do and so much input into the way the program works. I may have a boss, but I have very rarely felt as if I were anything less than an important member of the team. At least in terms of dealing with the Camp USA program. The company as a whole, well, that's a slightly different story.
Anyway, the Graduate Assistant said she'd forward my message on to the Graduate Chair (the woman I thought I was writing to begin with) and one of the two of them would get back to me. I have to say, knowing that I've pretty much almost certainly gotten into UW, I'm a little less eager to get a turn-around on the Berkeley thing, and I will feel sort of bad if they admit me on appeal only to have me turn them down instead, but I'll live.