Wednesday, April 18, 2007
After spending about twenty minutes today catching up on the Virginia Tech story, I’ve used up about as much energy as I can. Most people have used the story as a political soapbox, spouting nonsense about everything from gun control and racism to prescription drugs and the media.
I can find no deeper meaning in this tragedy than as a reminder of the frailty of human lives and minds.
On a personal note, I’ve thought carefully about whether this event will have any effect on my teaching next year, since I will likely have a sizable class of undergrads. And when I honestly consider it, I expect that I will have the rampage in the back of my mind, and probably form prejudices about students who seem too introverted. But, so it goes.
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Wednesday, April 11, 2007
It’s official
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Monday, April 9, 2007
Just got back from visiting the University of Maryland. Maryland never got back to me about my application, and I had assumed they rejected me. I emailed them exactly a week ago asking where they were with my application, and they sent a reply saying they were going to accept me without funding. Which is the grad school equivalent of tying a $15,000 carrot on five year long stick.
Then last Thursday, someone decided not to go to UMD, which opened up a seat for me. So I had to make an emergency trip to Maryland today to go check it out.
One thing that stood out about visiting Maryland over Washington and Oregon was the vast surplus of money they were throwing around. Maryland was able to pay for my lodging and car rental from New York, which believe me was not cheap.
But the best part? And the end of my visit, I got a goodie bag from Maryland containing a t-shirt and a USB flash drive. Okay, now I’ma go download 128MB of… math.
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