When I was at graduate school, you wouldn’t have recognised me. I was so different – and not a nice person: a grumpy, surly, upset, confused, lost person.
I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.
I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I’d never been around poor whites before.
I’d applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it’s that I’m good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.
I was really desperate. I don’t know if you can remember back that far, but when I went to graduate school they didn’t want females in graduate school. They were very open about it. They didn’t mince their words. But then I got in and I got my degree.
My mother, whose interest in chemistry was rather minimal, nevertheless went to graduate school in the subject and married my father, for whom it was as important as life itself.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, ‘Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.’
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being – well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
Like a lot of people, I sold my first script in graduate school at UCLA, a ‘Joan of Arc’ for producer Joel Silver.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks’ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘
Because I didn’t go to graduate school or have mentorship out of college, meeting other playwrights and developing those friendships as a result of being a ‘grown up’ playwright – that’s become an essential community for me. My contemporaries are all my mentors whether they know it or not.
Friends of mine were the creators and executive producers of ‘Damages,’ people I knew from graduate school.
Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said ‘you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.’ I created the program, went to college and graduate school and now here I am.
When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.
I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.
When I was in first grade, some psychologist told my mom if I didn’t go to graduate school, she basically failed as a parent, because I had the aptitude to do it. Which is so dumb. Huge pressure!
I think, overall, there is a lack of diversity in the arts. I’m thinking about when I was in grad school: I could probably count on one hand the number of minority students in the graduate school program.
Working at Pixar has been like my graduate school for screenwriting.
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