Graduate School
I’ll be heading to Albuquerque in the fall to begin classes in the math department at University of New Mexico.
I also had an offer from the University of Delaware. In my judgement, UDel actually has a somewhat stronger math program than UNM does; however, I was very impressed by the quantum computing group at UNM. Before visiting, this particular group was just one of several things at UNM which had piqued my interest (hence my decision to apply to math, rather than physics).
I hadn’t really been planning (or wanting) to make any hard decisions on exactly where to direct my research interests until later on (say, after the first year of grad school). So, under these circumstances, choosing between the two schools was a bit nerve-racking. Indeed, I am suffering pangs of uncertainty, doubt, and second-guessing even as I write this post. However, I’m fairly certain that I’d be suffering just the same if I had made the opposite choice. Anyway, I think there is a very good chance that I will indeed be able to join the quantum info group at UNM. And there are other options open to me at UNM; if things don’t work out with that particular group, it would only be a small disaster for me, not a large one.
On the topic of small disasters, I should say something about my travel experiences. Over the course of the last week I traveled from Seattle to Albuquerque to Delaware and back to Seattle (with several planned and unplanned layovers along the way). Flying was perfectly dreadful. I made three mad dashes across airports to catch flights (I’m 2 for 3), was separated from my luggage (subsequently delivered to me at UDel’s math dept. in a hay-filled van driven by a cowboy-hat-wearing redneck goatherd — wtf?!?), suffered a cumulative 13 hours of delays, and caught a cold. Next time I need to travel to the east coast, I’m going to walk.
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