Grad School Part 1 - Colorado
I know my Spring Break story will be much more interesting, but I have to back up to cover everything else that has been happening. The second weekend of March (9th-13th), I went to Boulder to visit the University of Colorado at Boulder. This was my first graduate school visit, so I was kind of nervous, but I was glad that I could "practice" at Colorado before visiting MIT and Stanford. Overall, the program is prety decent, but their strong points are astrodynamics, building instruments and small satellites, and bioastronautics. Although I used to be more interested in astrodynamics, I'd rather do space design, and while building satellites would be interesting, their actual space design program is still being built, so I might not benefit from that. And in a new twist of events, I've always been interested in biology and human reactions in space, but I didn't think I had the right background for it, so I never said anything. Turns out, that's ok. So Colorado's strong academic point is their good program in life sciences in space. GT doesn't really have a program like that yet, and as you'll find out later, MIT does.But UCB's main selling point is that Colorado is gorgeous. I found that out with Rachel when I stayed with her Friday night to Sunday morning. Friday we left right after I was done with grad school stuff for a hot sulfur spring. It was about 2 hours away in the mountains, so it was about 30 degrees outside, and the smell was just slightly unpleasant, but the hot springs were amazing. There are about 20 or so separate "tubs", so we got to relax for about 5-10 minutes in one before rushing off in the freezing weather to the next one. Quite a Colorado experience.
The next day we had an amazing breakfast at the Buff Restaurant (I could have my share of fun with the "buff" jokes there), climbed around Red Rocks (it was a beautiful 65 degrees out), then took a tour of the Coors Brewery, where we then got free beer because it rocks to be 21. We ran into another guy who was on the trip there, David, who also visited MIT the following week when I did. That night I had a (blind) date to AEPi's chartering banquet, which had good food, and it was nice to dress up, but well, not the best first blind date experience. When we left, there was 2 inches of snow on the ground! Talk about a weather swing.
Department rating: 6
Boulder rating: 8.5
Overall rating: 7
posted by Biff @ 9:45 PM
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