Yay! I'm going to UConn this fall!
I flew to SF on March 3rd. Arrived around 10 AM. I spent the day running errands -- moving money and mailing forms to US Immigration for Colin. Then I slept a little and left for Hartford at 6 am on the 4th. Ahhh! I flew all day. I spent the next 2.5 days touring the campuses and meeting with potential advisors and faculty in Storrs and Avery Point.
Christophe is one of my advisors. He's from Switzerland, and he arrived at UConn about a year ago. He is very friendly and a very good scientist. He has a brand new shiny lab, and he saved some money, so I (or him or another future student) can get another piece of lab equipment, if needed (OMG!!!). I am already scheming to get a mini CAVE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment http://keckcaves.ucdavis.edu/
It will cost about $5,000. I wants it. This isn't like when I told Dawn I needed my own nanoSIMS to finish my senior thesis.
Anyway, Christophe organized my trip to UConn, and I stayed with a student of his for the duration of the trip. Christina is from Germany, but she went to university in Switzerland. Christophe was her advisor back in Switzerland, and she spends a month at UConn once or twice a year. I stayed with her in a nice house just off campus, and we got along fabulously. I spent my first day at Storrs, and I met all the faculty and many of the grad students in the Center for Integrative Geosciences. The Geology department was shredded a few years ago due to a bad old-boys-club attitude they had going on, so the Center is quite small, with few grad students and faculty, but plenty of undergrads. All the profs were very nice. Christophe and Pieter (my other advisor, and director of the Center) are two of the 5 or so major faculty, so the Center has a large focus on geobiology. The program should get larger once government funding is back on track.
I spent the second day at the labs at Avery Point, on Groton, where my other advisor, Pieter, is based. The labs are very pretty, and the building is brand new compared to anything in Storrs. It is on the ocean, and sometimes you can see the nuclear subs swim by. It is an hour from the Storrs campus on twisty roads, and you pass the off-ramp to my friend Nina's parents' house. There's a giant frozen waterfall near the off-ramp -- it's REALLY nifty. Pieter was very busy that day because he was flying on Monday to Perth. He was spending 2 weeks in Oz with Brendan, the prof at the University of New South Wales that I wanted to work with, except I didn't find money, and I decided I wanted the nice student stipends you get in the States. Yes, I am funded. woot!!!
I spent the next day in Mystic, mostly at Pieter's house with his family and Christina. Christina and I wandered through the touristy part of Mystic, and I toured the local organic shop to make sure Earth Moon Rising pasta was available in the state. It was. I make big decisions like this with my stomach, apparently.
I left that evening, and got back to Sac around midnight, after a very interesting plane flight. I had a rough-living couple seated next to me on the plane, to my horror, but they turned out to be really entertaining and very friendly. The extremely low humidity on the plane quickly dried my sinuses out completely so the booze smell disappeared pretty fast.
I spent the next week back in Sac sleeping and spending time with my family. On Thursday, I went to UCD for my official UCD Geology prospective student visit. I didn't want to make a formal decision until after my UCD day, and UCD day was very very helpful. I met with 4 faulty, 2 of which I had never met before (long story!), I had lunch with Cara, who is one of my most favorite grad students of all time, I had a good 2 hour meeting with Dawn, and I had a sleepover at Bekah and Nina's house.
Cara was very helpful. She could tell what mattered to me better than I could. Dawn told me I was absolutely welcome to return to Davis, but she is very VERY excited by the prospect of sending me over to UConn... think merging of two lab superpowers... woohoo! So, after some time in Dawn's office, I knew what I should do. Dawn is a wonderful advisor, and I'm very sad to leave her lab, but I feel better knowing that she's not cutting me loose, and that she'll be involved in my research and my career in the future. I'm already planning on going back to use the CAVE in the basement and pick her brain about stuff.
The sleepover was fun. Nina was tired. She had to NMR an iguana that day (4th year vet student, about to finish). I learned that you calm iguanas down by pushing on their eyeballs! We watched most of The Abyss, and I asked Bekah questions about technical diving and living at extreme depths, and she researched the answers while we watched the movie. It was a diving nerdfest. I learned many strange facts. We talked about UConn, science, life, disney, and it was great... like I never left. I did feel cheated because Geoffrey the cat did not yell at his catnip carrot at midnight, like he usually does. This was the highlight of my day when I cat-sat.
I spent the next few days with family and friends, and was back on the plane on the 16th. I flew over the international dateline near midnight, local time, and missed St. Patricks day 2009 completely. I arrived in Auckland on the 18th. I cleared customs with a suitcase full of Kraft and Amy's Mac and Cheese, couscous, girl scout cookies, fun dip, wine, eyeshadow, and shiny new raincoats. And a pair of pink and white snowman slippers from Target. They had carrot noses and poofy ear muffs! I lost my will to shop in NZ, and got it back my last day in Sac. I can't wait to furnish our Storrs apartment at the IKEA in New Haven.
Yes, Colin is coming with me, much to his parents' horror, I suspect. His paperwork has been submitted, and Homeland Security took the money. We've been talking about job options a lot, and I think he'll do just fine. Sissy helped me test drive cars so we can fly in in August, buy a car fast, drive cross country, shop till we drop at IKEA, and then I start school, and he has a car to drive around in until his work permit comes through. Then he can drive around and find a job. Storrs is in the middle of Nowhere, so there will be much driving for us. Hence, nice, maybe new, all wheel drive car.
I can't wait to start at UConn. I feel like the next four months are just me sitting around and waiting to start. I'm back at work, and I now have the much awaited copy of Battlestar Galactica season 4.1 from the library, so I'm keeping busy, but I wanna go NOW!!! Bekah wants me to help on a project of hers once I'm settled at UConn, so I have stolen her library access codes and I get to help with the research. I am super excited, and super happy.
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