Tag Archive for 'duke university'

Home Again, Home Again

Published
by
Nicole
on 3/18/2006
in Journal
. 9 Comments

I got back today from visiting Michigan, and my feelings at the moment can be summed up in two words: exhaustion and shock. These last few days have gotten crazy again in terms of graduate school-related news. I’ve now been officially accepted at all six of the universities to which I applied, have received financial offers from three of them (Cornell, Virginia, and Michian), and have a financial offer from a fourth, Duke, in the mail. I just got done sending e-mails off to the four professors who have e-mailed me in the past three days. Everyone is interested in hearing a decision sooner rather than later, and, while I understand and sympathize fully with that sentiment, this upcoming week promises to be a nasty one as it contains all of my midterms.

I learned this weekend that Michigan offered admission to about 30 students out of around 380 applicants. That’s an acceptance rate of just under 8%. The very idea that I made it into such a group boggles my mind, and I know that the statistics for several of these other schools probably aren’t all that different. To be honest, that doesn’t make me feel good. If anything, I feel like there must have been a mistake somewhere because I’m certainly not as amazing as this response would seem to indicate.

On Grad School Visits and Research

Published
by
Nicole
on 3/16/2006
in Journal
. 3 Comments

I have not utterly forgotten that I promised to report on my trip to Cornell. In fact, I spent most of my (copious) airport/airplane time today writing about just that. I’m pretty sure that some of the people on the flight thought I was cracked because I only paused to rip pages out of my notebook and turn them over to write on the back. I have a lot to say on the topic of that visit, though, and I’m not entirely certain that I want to post it all publicly. So, for anyone who has more than just a glancing interest in how my visit went–and this includes the lowdown on Bill Nye, people–leave a comment here using a proper e-mail address (which won’t be displayed to anyone but me) and I’ll put together a nice long e-mail message with all the details. Alternatively, if there’s really only one aspect of the weekend that you’re interested in hearing about–like which professors I want to work with or something like that–you can specify that in the comment and I’ll tailor what I send to your interests.

It’s possible that, at some point, I’ll go ahead and post everything here, but that’s entirely unforeseen right now. I’m still debating on whether to place an edited version here, actually. Thoughts?

In other graduate school news, I’m currently writing from Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the eve of what appears to be my final graduate school visit. I got word from Notre Dame yesterday that they’ve accepted me but have no financial aid offer. Tonight, amidst bad news, I got word from Duke that I’ve been officially accepted there and that my financial offer is in the mail (ha ha ha!). I was kind of starting to wonder if they’d decided not to accept me after all.

I haven’t said much about life outside of graduate school visits recently, perhaps because that stuff probably isn’t of much interest to anyone. This week was my final Spring Break, though, and I suppose that should earn it at least a footnote in this on-going chronicle of my life. I spent all of Monday and Wednesday working in the lab, feverishly denting my head against concrete walls. Well, I should back up. My research is actually (finally) going well. My equipment works. It’s possible to take data from both the software and hardware perspective. Most of my troubles this week were in trying to make sense of my data, and a trip to see my advisor helped a lot with that. Since it’s a slower week than normal for him, we spent about an hour in his office going through things together in Excel and discussing what it all meant before I headed back to my hovel to program the same type of analysis into MATLAB. I quite enjoyed just getting to work one-on-one with him for an extended period of time again; it feels like forever since that’s happened. At one point I brought up Cornell and some of the stuff I saw there and how excited I was at the prospect of working on some of these problems. And, though he was clearly happy for me, there was also something genuinely sad in his manner as he told me that I would have to be sure to let him know what I ended up doing. I don’t know if he was sad that I’m leaving, or if he’s sad that he won’t be working on those problems, or if it was something else entirely, but it definitely struck me as uncharacteristic for him.

Duke Visit, Part Three

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/14/2006
in Journal
. 3 Comments

Here ends the saga of the Duke visit. Unlike the other two entries, this one was not written the day of.

Continue reading ‘Duke Visit, Part Three’

Duke Visit, Part Two

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/14/2006
in Journal and memorable
. 0 Comments

This is the second entry that I wrote while visiting Duke but was unable to post until now. It was written 10 February 2006 at 9:50 pm. And it’s long, sort of like the day I wrote it. Don’t let that turn you off, though.

Continue reading ‘Duke Visit, Part Two’

Duke Visit, Part One

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/14/2006
in Journal
. 1 Comment

So, as I indicated, I didn’t have the expected Internet access during my trip to Duke. But I wrote entries anyway, and now I’m posting them. Below is my first entry, written 9 February 2006 at 9:27 pm, Eastern time.

Continue reading ‘Duke Visit, Part One’

Quick Update

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/10/2006
in Asides
. 1 Comment

The Internet connection I was supposed to have in my room is not working; therefore, I shall have to wait until tomorrow to give everyone the low-down on my Duke visit. In the meantime, let me say that I’m very exhausted; I didn’t have any idea how much I missed college basketball; and I am a sucker for Gothic architecture.

Again With The Grad Stuff

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/7/2006
in Journal
. 4 Comments

Michigan has officially joined the fray. My cousin, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, is predicting a bidding war. I, naturally, am skeptical.

I am, however, happy to report that….

In a bizarre twist of fate, the last section of this post appears to have disappeared. That doesn’t matter. This is more important.

More on Grad Schools

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/4/2006
in Journal
. 4 Comments

My thanks to those of you who congratulated me on my invitation to Duke. To my surprise, I received a similar invitation from the University of Virginia yesterday. And this morning, to my chagrin, I was awakened bright and early by a phone call from my mother informing me that she’d forgotten to tell me when I called last night that the graduate director from my department of interest at the University of Michigan had left a message for me on their machine. They gave me the number, which I was having trouble writing down, what with trying to hold the phone and my bite splint in one hand and write with a poor pen on a Post-It note with the other. Nevermind the fact that I hadn’t so much as wiped the grit out of my eyes. So now, even though I don’t know what the guy from Michigan wants, I have his number. And I’m shorter on sleep than I wanted to be.

But it looks like February will be a month for traveling. And I like traveling.

Getting Wooed

Published
by
Nicole
on 2/1/2006
in Journal and memorable
. 7 Comments

The grand excitement of my day–aside from some frantic work on graduate fluids homework–came in the form of a series of e-mails from Duke University. The Mechanical Engineering and Material Science (MEMS) department has invited me to attend a special Graduate Visitation day next Friday. That, in itself, is not particularly exciting. I mean, the first thing I noticed in the e-mail is that they spelled my name incorrectly. What is exciting, however, is that they’re paying for the flight, the hotel (the Hilton!), the meals, the transportation–essentially everything except the Pay-Per-View. Now, Duke was not all that high on my list of Graduate Schools I Really, Really Want To Go To, and, in fact, I was rather put off by some less than responsive e-mails from them prior to the actual submission of my application. And that name thing was definitely a black mark, too. But this, this is some high class treatment. Something in that electronic bundle I sent them must have impressed them, and I doubt it was the GRE scores.

The itinerary is pretty well packed: welcoming assemblies, campus and department tours, meeting faculty, lunch with current graduate students, and even a women’s basketball game. For those who don’t know, I used to be a basketball player. Also, Duke is one of the best universities in the U.S. when it comes to basketball. So that should be fun.

The wisdom of having scheduled all of my classes Monday through Thursday is now apparent. I’m flying out after classes Thursday evening and have arranged my flight on Saturday such that I’ll be able to meet my family for lunch before flying back. Actually, my advisor said that he wouldn’t mind if I missed his (graduate-level) class for a trip like this one. He even offered to sit down with me and go over the entire missed lecture. I’m quite glad I went to ask him about it, actually, because my initial reaction upon getting the invitation was pretty much that I would feel bad about making them pay lots of money to bring me down there when I wasn’t really planning on going there. But, as my advisor pointed out, this is them trying to change my mind, and they deserve that chance.

One of the other e-mails from Duke today included another tidbit to make one ponder. It urged me to switch my application from the master’s track directly to the Ph.D. track because “an interested professor” suggested that this would provide greater funding opportunities. I could be mistaken, but that sounds kind of like, “There’s someone here who is hoping that being able to offer you more money will get you into his lab.”

It’s fun to be wooed.