CMU

[nibot]

It's pouring rain in Pittsburgh now, and I'm hiding in the library at CMU. I did get to go up to the thirty-sixth floor of the "Cathedral of Learning," an inexplicable gothic monolith dominating the city. They say it was featured in Batman, and it's easy to believe; the thing is 100% pure Gotham, but with charming "Nationality" classrooms on the first floor: The Polish Room, the Lithuanian Room, the Swedish Room, the German Room, the Early American Room, the Czeckloslovak Room...

Sigh. I'm waiting for some kind of spark when I meet a professor, and it's just not happening. I haven't been able to get excited really by anyone's work here. It might be a failure just as much of communication as anything else, their ability to make their projects sound exciting. But projects that I'd jump at for a summer term I'm a lot more hesitant to accept for dedicated pursuit over a term of six years. As much as anything, I want them to want me as I want their work to be interesting. One professor - one who I already liked the most - mentioned with interest, "You lived in Lund, right?" And I was thinking: "She actually read my application!"

There was one professor I went to because his work sounded pretty exciting, quantum chromodynamics and all that. And this guy was terrifying! He seemed like an ordinary guy, but we asked him about his past grad students. He said, "Well, I've had three.. but two of them left me." Small warning sign: can't retain grad students. Big warning sign: "I'm so glad he is gone. Gosh! He just wasn't talented enough, he wasn't worth my money, he wasn't worth my time... He didn't even speak English very well!" Egads! I nod while crossing him off my list. Quite literally. And then he turns out, moreover, to be a bit of an intellectual chauvanist: when the guy from MIT comes into the room, he stops talking to the other two of us. He asks the MIT guy to come back later for another meeting.

But then I met his one surviving grad student, who he described with admiration in his eyes as his "star". And this guy was really fabulous, eight times more energetic than the normal mortal and a little bit crazy to boot, in exactly the way I like. So I'd love to work with this grad student, but his advisor seemed like he ought to be avoided within a certain radius.

I have the occassional feeling that, although the Physics dept here and elsewhere admitted me, the professors are far more skeptical. It can't be entirely true (the admissions committee is composed of professors), but still I had one prof sort of skoff, "You mean your degree is not in Physics??" The experimental particle physicists are nice to me, but that's not what I want to do. I think I did impress a particular condensed matter experimentalist that I knew What Was Going On, and I was able to converse intelligently with a medium energy experimentalist.. but...

WHERE ARE THE LASERS???

Carnegie Mellon seems like a nice place, and Pittsburgh is an interesting city. If Rochester's physics department were here, I think I would accept without much hesitation. But otherwise I think I could only leave Berkeley with a heavy heart, and I don't think I could ditch the feeling that I left someplace wonderful for something substandard.

It's not that this is a bad place, it's just that I have extremely high expectations. I have half a mind to just accept and see what happens, and half a mind to just stay at Berkeley and take the graduate physics sequence through my own guerrilla initiative. From my job interviews at Aerospace and at UCSD/IGPP, I came away thrilled with the idea I'd be working for them. I haven't gotten that feeling here or at Rochester.

I also occassionally wonder whether Physics is really what I want to study. I always come to the conclusion that it is, because physics is hard and I want the challenge, because physics is at the core of anything else I'd be interested in, and because I have this idea that if you're going to study something, it ought to be physics. But in engineering / computer science, I can really hold my own. Concepts come very easy to me and engineering is nicely compatible with my intuition. In physics I don't feel quite so brilliant.

One of the prospective students — from Caltech — here also got into Chicago and Berkeley. One of the professors he was talking to here at CMU learned of this. The professor whispered to him, emphatically:``Go to Berkeley.''

Comments

[roxymartini.livejournal.com]

In physics I don't feel quite so brilliant.
OH, but you are. and i don't say that just because i don't know anything about physics either. there is also something fabulous about drowning. drowning- it's a term i made up that is sort of like a flooding of the senses, a submersion into a particular field or pursuit. the idea is, you either become brilliant (if you weren't already) or you drown. and of course, you could never drown. i believe in you. go Schmobin!

[janviere.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to compound any insecurities here, but feeling like you "ought" to do something doesn't seem like a good enough reason to spend six years dedicating your life to it. Hard, sure, fundamental, sure (although a lot of people I know whose work spans different fields are prefectly capable of teaching themselves what they need) but you can get that much out of an undergraduate or masters education. I'm not convinced you wouldn't be happier doing a multidisciplinary science graduate program, like the ones you were lusting about a while back. It seems like you should be able to come up with something applying engineering to physics or physics to engineering and get the best of both worlds. Like in your summer job.

But if you don't like that idea, and want to go to a school with a pedigree, you could accept somewhere "substandard" and reapply everywhere (ie, Berkeley) in a year or two after you have a bit more coursework and real-live graduate research experience under your belt. It wouldn't be Berkeley, but you would be paid for the experience, and you can always change your mind.

[ragnus.livejournal.com]

I agree. Maybe you can get an MS elsewhere then reapply to Berkeley's PhD program.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

One thing that I'm absolutely sure about is that I want to take the graduate-level physics coursework, so that much is (almost) for certain. There are also certainly cool things to research, and I have a few things in mind.. the tricky part is finding an advisor who qualifies as "awesome."

Oddly, I would be paid better to be a fake grad student at Berkeley than a real grad student elsewhere, and I wouldn't have teaching duties.

We'll see, though. Pittsburgh is sort of growing on me, a little.

I still have my hopes on the AS+T group at Berkeley, which has plenty of interdisciplinary elbow room.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I'm a little concerned about maintaining continuity.. while in the coursework phase I should be shopping for a research advisor, which is easier while that advisor is at the same institution. I'm going to probe around at Berkeley in the next few weeks...

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I'm also pretty curious to hear the whole story from my Alaska advisor (who I'll be working for in San Diego this summer). He went so far as to get a masters degree in nuclear physics with the top group in the world (which several years later was awarded the nobel prize for bose-einstein condensates, in conjunction with ketterlee at MIT), and then abruptly switched to seismology and moved to Alaska to do it. His reason was that he was following his advisor-to-be, but that doesn't completely answer the question.

On a similar subject, I think Kent would be an PhD awesome advisor himself. But he's no longer in academia. (He works for UCSD/IGPP as a consultant.)