Ok, honesty first: I am not a graduate student at UW. I am an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. However, barring something drastic happening, I will be a student in the mathematics PhD program at UW in about four months time, and I think the story starts here. This is the beginning, the genesis of my life as a graduate student. The prologue to the story. The conception before birth. The spike in progesterone that occurs in the first trimester. The
er, sorry. That got weird.
Moving on then...
Choosing a graduate school is hard. That surprised me. First off, I had no idea what type of school would take me, where I fell on the great student ranking that exist no where but the minds of terrified undergrads worried they won't have a future because there are so many better students out there. So I did the logical thing (ha) and spent a month's worth of rent applying to 13 schools covering what I thought was a pretty wide range of selectivity. Let them decide where I should go! All in all I received offers from 6 schools, an outright rejection from MIT (shocking, right?) and silence from the other 6. I guess those schools didn't want to hurt my feelings or something. When applying, I had mistakenly envisioned receiving offers from only a couple of schools, one of which would be clearly better than the others. I don't know why I thought this would happen. It did not. All the schools I received an offer from, indeed all the schools I applied to, had a lot of merits. My decision would in no way be easy. Maybe, I thought, visiting would make it clear where I was supposed to be. It did not.
The next month or so (ok ok I am skipping over the anxiety of waiting for more acceptances, my 6 offers were strung out over a month or so, but once you get the first one the anxiety goes away a little) I got to experience the surprisingly stressful life of a recruit.
Quick aside: I am one of those crazy college football fans who checks the best team blog (mgoblog.com in the case of Michigan) hourly, and keeps up to date with the decisions of the best high school football players in the country. I like to think that my experience was a little like those of the future NFL stars that I read about. I am wrong, but it makes me feel important. I imagine someone reading a blog post somewhere about how much I enjoyed my visit to Utah and envisioning how I would help their math department defeat their rival math department in some sort of nerd bowl.
I was lucky enough to be invited to take free trips to the schools I was considering. My first trip was to UW, and I loved it. Madison is Ann Arbor but bigger, and with a lake. I was ready to choose then and there but I knew I had to consider some other options. I next took a trip to Raleigh to visit NCSU. The people in the math bio program there are awesome, as is the program itself, but I knew I would choose UW over NC State. Good, I thought. Visits are clearing things up for me. Then I went to Pittsburgh. The University of Pittsburgh seemed like a great place to be. I felt there exactly how I had felt in Wisconsin. Suddenly, the decision became more difficult.
The last trip I took was to Salt Lake City, to visit the University of Utah. Putting aside all the restrictions on alcohol that the state of Utah has, this was a great visit as well. The grad students and professors I met at Utah were unbelievable. The applied math department and mathematical biology group at Utah would have certainly been a great fit for me. But that was true of Pittsburgh and Wisconsin as well. My difficulty would not be in saying yes to one of these places. It would be hard to turn the other two down!
And so I returned home, unsure of what my decision would be, or even how I would make it. I could see myself at any of the three, and I am sure I could be successful at any of them. It took a couple of days of soul searching and daydreaming, but eventually I made my decision. Of the three programs, Pittsburgh and Utah both had groups focused on math biology who were motivated by biological questions which could be answered in part by math, while Wisconsin had only a few faculty interested in biology and were mostly focused on applied math in general. This distinction, I knew, would make the difference. However, I did not know what side of that divide I fell on. I hope to never lose interest in physiology and medicine, but ultimately, I came to realize, I wanted my impact to be on the world of mathematics. It is the mathematical questions that interest me, and applied math at UW would give me the best focus on mathematics and how to apply it to a wide range of problems.
And so I am off to UW next fall. I am leaving the wolverine state and heading to the badger state. Apparently I like weasels. I plan to make this blog more funny than serious in the future, but this initial post was necessary to set the stage. This is a blog about being a grad student, so I think I won't write much until I actually am one. In the mean time, I have to finish up here in Ann Arbor, then relax on a beach for a couple of months. Then life gets interesting.
