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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.''
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.''
