And Hopefully the Slavers Aren’t Active During the School Year
It’s final, then: I’m going to Pittsburgh! The program is unquestionably top-tier and the faculty are outstanding — both in terms of their quality of research and, like, personality. And I think it’ll provide more than 3-4 hours of gameplay, especially since I’m not Level 20 in real life. I like to pretend like I am, but I’m really not.
I *hope* I enjoy my stay.
The decision feels a little anti-climactic or something though. I dunno. It sort of seems like an arbitrary place, probably in part due to it not being on the short list of schools I was looking at last summer (when I was still looking primarily at strategic management programs). But FWIW, I didn’t end up applying to any of those early short-list schools. I guess it’s also not really a part of the country anyone’s heard much about since 1980, so maybe for that reason.
And the school has its own organizational behavior lab!
It should be cool, though. I’ll probably buy a house and hopefully it’s a little bit of a fixer so I can do some projects on it. Maybe that’ll be the blog for this summer. So there’s that to look forward to! (For you.) (Well — and for me.) Plus I’ll be able to make cryptic references to Fallout 3 DLC at will and, while no one will know what I’m talking about, the references will, technically, be appropriate.
Weapon in hand, a newly minted PhD looks forward to her bright future.
Will probably fly out there again in maybe May and look for a place to live, then move out for real once it closes escrow or whatever. You can get a pretty decent place for not much money out there — the trick is not taking a bath when you’re trying to sell it four to five years later.
So I got that going for me.
Excelsior,
bkd
This Is What Pittsburgh Looks Like
Part of Pittsburgh, or Pgh to the abbreviators. I dunno — seems like Pit or Pbg would be a better shorthand. Can’t fight tradition, though, I guess. And DYK, the name of the city was spelled without an “h” for 21 years at the turn of the 20th century for some reason.
Government overreach. That was the reason. Not kidding.
And one day I’ll go somewhere with (one of) my real camera(s) again. Just that my point-and-shoot has to go back to the factory (it’s in an envelope, has been there for a week now, on my desk) and the DSLR is freakin’ huge, which matters when it comes to not checking luggage. And having to bring a parka. So: cell phone photos.
Got back from The Pitt on Saturday night, was there for about 44 hours total, during which time it never got over 20 degrees. Everyone there apologized for the weather, but honestly it’s kind of cool to have a good reason to wear said parka for once and anyway, clear skies and 15 degrees breaks up the monotony of overcast and 65 in a welcome manner. Seriously. For me.
I’d rather have clear skies than warm temperatures anyway.
Generally.
Pittsburgh, at night, from the top of Washington Hill.
So, surprisingly, not quite enough light for the ol’ cell phone on that one. OTOH, it was a great view — you can see a few of the city’s bridges down there and the confluence of the rivers (Allegheny and Monongahela). Went to a restaurant very close to this location with the exact same view, which was pretty cool.
View from Room 615 at the Wyndham Hotel.
So you can kind of see some Pittsburgh topography in that one also. And some snow, and Forbes Street, which is a main thoroughfare in Oakland, the part of town where Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon are. The topography in Pittsburgh makes it an interesting place — hills and rivers and tunnels and bridges break up the neighborhoods so it’s not like most cities where it’s just a big old paved place with buildings on top.
Center field wall of the former Forbes Field. The business school is now located where the right field grandstand was.
The Pirates played here until Three Rivers was built. This is where they won the World Series in 1960 with the Bill Mazeroski home run against the Yankees and all that. It’s all now incorporated into Pitt’s campus.
The Cathedral of Learning on Pitt campus.
It’s the second tallest higher-education building in the world! And for some reason it’s in a neo-gothic style. And the inside looks like Hogwarts. Some sort of depression-era make-work project. Kind of seems like they could’ve come up with a better name for it. IMHO.
Installation art at the Mattress Factory museum. The faces talk to you.
That one was a little disconcerting. Installation art is odd stuff, but at least it gives the viewer something to do (e.g., “slowly walk toward the gray rectangle”, “sit in utter darkness for fifteen minutes”).
Tarmac at sunset with baggage cart.
Might’ve been good with a real camera and tripod is all.
It’s an interesting, old town. I mean, you feel how old it is everywhere you go — like the “incline” that takes you to the top of Mt. Washington is the one that steelworkers were using to get down to work on the river back in… eh, some year that was a long time ago. It’s kind of the opposite of New York where every building gets torn down and re-built every fifty years (seemingly). It also feels like an odd combination of cramped and over-built. The streets were all made for horse-drawn buggies, so parking and driving is tight — but there aren’t that many people driving, so you never feel trapped. Might have something to do with the population declines over the last three or four decades, but it’s an odd combination.
Pgh!
bkd
The Two Photos I Took While I Was in Oklahoma
I took them with my cell phone because that was what I had with me.
Me in the computer lab and distressingly clean-shaven.
The "Big XII Store" at OKC Will Rogers International Airport.
Two things:
- From the gear available in the store, you’d think they were advocating getting rid of the other XI — sort of like USC in the Pac 1.
- I don’t think there are any regularly scheduled international flights going through Will Rogers. They had flights to Houston, though, which may be close enough.
The trip to Oklahoma went real well. It’s a friendly town (Norman, I mean) that seemed like an easy place to be as far as that goes. And the football stadium isn’t at the *exact* center of campus — but pretty close. Surprisingly pretty campus, though, and while there I learned that there’s an architectural style called “Cherokee Gothic”. Not sure how that jives with the Cherokee Wild Potato, but certainly it must.
bkd
Turns Out I’m Not Any Stupider Than I Was 14 Years Ago
At least, not according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council. Although, to analyze my own assertion, I should note the following unsupported assumptions:
- The GMAT in 2009 does not necessarily test in the same manner as it did in 1995.
- The scores may be scaled differently today.
- The test may not be a good measure of intelligence as such.
- It may be that in 2009 I compensated for having become stupider by preparing better for the examination.
But whatever: I did well enough on it that I don’t have to do it again and I beat my old score (barely).
bkd
My GMAT Prep Course with Veritas
Haven’t talked about this much, but I’m getting ready to apply to Business PhD programs for admission in Fall of 2010. To that end, I have to take the GMAT again (turns out schools don’t accept 14-year-old scores) and since I figured I was going to have a hard time getting myself to study for it, I enrolled in a course with “Veritas Prep”, which sounds like an aptly branded high school for nouveau riche children.
It’s not. It’s just another test prep company like Kaplan and Princeton Review. I’ve gone for two weeks now and…
Good:
- For the money, they give you a lot of class time (14 sessions vs. 8 or so with the other companies).
- The workbooks they use are pretty well written and lend themselves to self-teaching.
- On the second night of class one person who was re-taking the class said that last time everything moved too fast for her, to which the instructor responded that it moves as fast as it moves and they expect students to have some reasonable understanding of the subject matter beforehand so deal with it. I’m paraphrasing.
- Most of the answer keys are correct.
Bad:
- The teachers are more like TAs than professors. Basically, they just read through the manual and answer questions if they come up. I’m guessing this is the Veritas method, but it seems a little half-hearted.
- More class sessions means it’s kind of a pain having to spend three hours twice a week to attend.
- The hotel where the classes are held appears to have no food-vending machines.
- The other students in the class — well, yeah. I guess they’re about what I expected. But since most of the students in the class are going to be happy scoring 600 and the instruction is focused mostly on them — well…
All in all — it’s probably the right thing for me to be doing to prepare for the test. I get next to nothing out of the in-class instruction, but it gives me six relatively quiet hours a week during which I can work through the workbooks and practice problems, which is a lot more time than I’d spend preparing otherwise.
bkd