Stanford
I spent the weekend in California. It was pretty nice.
Last weekend I had my wisdom teeth out, forcibly removed. That was less nice. I went under to have a molar implanted and woke up missing 3 teeth! They had to come out eventually anyway, but the doctor told me to wait a year. Apparently he changed his mind on the fly. Or, more likely, just fucked up. I’m loving modern medicine right now. Or was when I was bleeding out the nose and mouth for four hours and throwing up all the painkillers last Friday. That was a good time.
At least I got to watch most of a season of Grey’s Anatomy and this weird Scottish show called Monarch of the Glen. I did nothing but that for days at a time, though, and my imagination started to be pretty engrossed in the shows. Which got weird. Rapidly.
But certainly the best news of late is this past weekend’s trip to Stanford. I went to a basketball game the night I got there, remembered how much I hated basketball, but at least had fun standing in the equivalent of the Orange Krush section. Not knowing all the little goofy things they do made me feel a bit conspicuous, however, but I had been awake since 5:15 am Central Time so I didn’t really care. I just wanted to go to sleep.
Friday morning I met with Prof. Doug Osheroff. He was at Bell Labs with my father for a while, although I didn’t know him at all. It was nice to talk to him, he talked some about the Physics department at Stanford and a number of other things. He had a tendency to embark on tangents that were never resolved, but when you win a Nobel Prize you’re allowed to change the conversation topic at will. I visited on of his classes, a freshman seminar about photography, which wasn’t terribly interesting but that’s mostly because the students seemed entirely apathetic. I’m actually sort of wishing I had visited a few more classes, but I’ll just trust that they’re all right. I’m really hoping the student body as a whole isn’t too jaded when it comes to the academics, though.
Coursework aside, the students were nice enough. Friendly, in no way intimidating, although I guess also not overwhelmingly impressive at first either. They mostly just seemed like regular California kids, which most of them are — its almost half in-state students. Which is a bit odd, but I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with it. In general I suppose nothing really struck me about the student body one way or the other, but I met enough cool people to assume I could be happy and find friends there. Which is, I suppose, all it really takes.
Which leaves for discussion the campus and the weather, both of which are beautiful. The housing varies, but even the less nice dorms are perfectly livable. I’m thinking I might try to do all-freshman housing, rather than 4-class, but they might be changing the system so that’s my only option anyway. You don’t meet your roommate until you get there, which is a little odd, but I suppose the idea is to keep you from making any judgements before you actually meet the person. Still, I’m not quite sure how much I like the idea. It’s all a bit much to be happening at once.
All in all, however, a nice campus with great programs in everything I’m interested in and friendly people in a beautiful part of the country is pretty hard to argue with. I bought myself a Stanford sweatshirt. If I get in to Princeton or Dartmouth or Amherst or Pomona I’ll certainly visit and consider, but they’re all going to have a tough sell.
