Episode XIII: Entertaining Interviewees

I had planned on entitling this post "Attending Class" and just talking about some of my classes, but then I started writing about this whole interviewing weekend thing at the end, and it got so long that I had to delete the first part about attending class. So maybe classes will come next week.

But for the time being...

This weekend and the next are “interview weekends” where the school invites prospective graduate students to campus to decide whether or not to admit them, and to show them what a nice program we have. The current graduate students are asked to help with a variety of tasks. The good things that we get to do are take the kids out to eat at some restaurants (above), paid for by the department; and on the actual interview day we have access to unlimited free coffee, donuts, pastries, cookies, baklava, etc. In fact, that was the only thing I had all day, breakfast lunch and dinner.

The not-so-good things that we got to do were to share the duties of picking up and dropping off the students at the airport. I had volunteered to drop some people off at the airport, and as luck would have it, a surprise snowstorm began just an hour before I was to leave. The department was having us drive their giant 15-passenger vans, the schedule was tight, the sun was setting and the snow was falling fast (I imagine an inch had already fallen). In addition, I had to continually answer questions and make conversation with the students while driving, and I really really had to urinate (too much free coffee).

Every couple of minutes it seemed we would pass a tow truck, or a police car, or a car turned backward on the side of the road. The drive was very intense, and what should have been a 1-2 hour round trip ended up taking 4 hours. And four hours of constant adrenaline can be exhausting. A few of the things that happened on the road:

• While still in Lawrence (a fairly hilly city) the van made it 2/3 of the way up a hill, and refused to go any further. I spun for a while, traffic building up behind me, until I came up with the wise idea to make everyone sit in the very back seat. It worked! And I made them sit there until we got on the highway.
• I found that the window didn’t work, so I had to sort of get out of the vehicle to pay the toll-road fees.
• While driving a conservative 35 mph on the highway, coming back, I noticed my speedometer suddenly shoot up to around 75 mph and stay there for a couple of seconds, before returning to 35.
  

Well I did make it back all in one piece. After returning the vehicle I went back into the building for a final, celebratory donut. Below is a picture of me saying “thank you” to the van for not getting me killed. It is also the first camera-phone picture that I have posted so far. Notice the difference?