Mmm, new blood

A crop of prospective grad students is currently going through the same process I went through about a year ago: the campus visit.

I volunteered to host one of the prospectives at my hovel during his stay. He was supposed to come in yesterday from Toronto, but his flight got cancelled twice due to severe weather conditions. And they were indeed severe. I rode shotgun to O'Hare to try and meet up with the second (attempted) flight, and on the way we drove through the storm. At that point in time, the road disappeared. By which I mean, we could make out the taillights of the cars immedaitely ahead of us, but where the lines might be, where the side of the road and concrete pillars and whatnot might be--we could only guess at such details. It was mildly terrifying. I think we might have shouted out a few curses, but it was hard to tell due to the deafening din of the car being pelted with hail at machine-gun speed.

So, it was a wasted trip, which was inconvenient, but I can sorta understand why they turned the flight back.

The rest of the prospectives made it through, though, and I had lunch with some of them today. This class is shaping up to be really international, with the prospective students hailing from a variety of countries, and having lived in a different variety of countries. Apparently only one out of the whole bunch is currently living in the States.

It sounds like mostly they got accepted to way more universities than I did, which makes me wonder if they might be smarter than me. So I guess I might have to end up sabotaging their studies in order to protect my own tenuous position--I hear that's how things are meant to work in the cut-throat world of academia, and it's about time I got used to it!

Then again, one of the prospectives got on my good side right away by saying that we're way cooler than our counterparts at Columbia (screw them anyways!). So maybe I'll play nice instead.