Our lectures today started with an enumeration of the various prizes that Rochester physicists have been awarded. It was meant to be impressive, but to me it seemed almost like damning with faint praise. Afterwards, Mattias turned to me and asked, ``Have you heard of any of those prizes?"
Except for the two nobel prizes (one to Steve Chu, who did his B.S. in Math and Physics at U of R, and one to the japanese dude who started KamiokaNDE), I had never heard of them before.
We had lectures from professors in each of the major subfields at a turbo pace today. The talks all went over and there was little time to get a word in edgewise. In a sense it was silly, because I already know about the standard model in a qualitative way, and I was much more interested in mundane details: "Do grad students get desks?" (yes) "Is there a machine shop?" (yes, but there's only one machinist) "How long will it take to graduate?" (5-6 years) "Does anyone take advantage of the exchange program with Cornell?" ("I've never heard of it.") "Do the frosh live mostly on campus?" (90% of them do) I've been feeling quite sick, so of course my exuberance has been dampened by the desire to stay cozily drugged and unconscious in bed. For almost the entirety of yesterday and today we were inside the physics building, which is sort of a dull place. The talks were in the basement.
Finally we got a long-awaited campus tour, got to go outside and bound about. The other students snickered by the obvious amusement the two Californians found in the snow. The tour revealed the incredible smallness of the campus.. This is really a small school! The buildings are heated to tropical temperatures to compensate for the sub-freezing temperature outside. I don't understand this over-compensation. Californians are content to put on a pullover indoors, but denizens of arctic climates insist on heating their buildings to tank-top temperatures.
The laser lab is awesome, but I'm not all that sure what sort of work one would be doing there. It is, like CERN, primarily an Engineering effort, in terms of the domain of the bulk of the labor.
We had a brief tour of student housing. All the buildings are brick, and the student housing is good but not particularly charming in any way. There are, for example, nothing like co-ops.
In the evening we gathered one last time to schmooze with the profs. They are all very eager to convince us to come to Rochester, and several remembered bits from our applications ("you're the computer guy" or "and you've been running all over the globe"). But I wasn't really feeling up to too much more schmoozing, so I talked with Mattias for most of the time. (It's amazing how much gossip can develop from one summer in Geneva. We also swapped travel tales.. he's been through Africa, Uzbekistan, all over the place.)
In a sense I think all the propective students are looking at each other for an evaluation of Rochester. The first to decide may set a trend. I haven't reached a conclusion myself. I think the department here is good, but I suppose my visit here has given me a better idea of the realities of graduate school, and it's a little frightening. Although I would like a change of environment, my hopes are ever more on the UC Berkeley AST group, although I fear that that graduate group has too many bigwigs and too few young advisors with an interest in students (something that is not lacking here).
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