This One Was Somewhat Backwards

As I have been explaining in recent posts, there is this irksome trend of bad weather cropping up in Lawrence just when I go on trips. However, for my final grad school visit (the University of Illinois), the bad weather showed up in other places, but still affected my travel plans.

Let’s start with flying out on Thursday night. The plane that was to take me from Kansas City to Chicago had to first stop through St. Louis to drop off some passengers on its way to KC. Because of thunderstorms, that plane was delayed, meaning I left KC perhaps an hour later than I intended. Consequently, I missed my connecting flight to Champaign-Urbana from O’Hare, and (not too surprisingly) there were no other flights that night. In retrospect, I probably could have stayed in a hotel that night and been reimbursed by UIUC chemical engineering, but I didn’t think of that at the time. I thought I would have to pay at least $50 to get a room. The thought was not particularly appealing.

Even the busiest airport in the world is practically deserted at 2 AM. This I discovered after resolutely vowing to camp out overnight in O’Hare. I figured that since I had an important Plant and Environmental Safety project due the next day, I would be staying up later than usual anyway, which made the problem of trying to sleep in an airport less pressing. I would type a bunch of stuff on my laptop, then find some Internet connection and send my material to my waiting group members back in Lawrence, while downloading a copy of their work to proofread and review. And then when I was really tired, I’d catch a few winks, which should have been easy at that point.

Before leaving for continental Europe on my spring break trip of 2004, I slept in London’s Stanstead airport one night, and not very restfully I might add. So on this trip, I was well aware of the hazards inherent in trying to sleep in an airport. Most available areas are hard floor, unless one is lucky enough to find some rows of chairs that don’t have armrests. On top of this, automated announcements about safety or the lurking threat of terrorism will probably come on every 15 minutes or so (although in Stanstead, this was not so after midnight). In any case, you can expect people to start showing up around 5 AM for the early flights, so good luck trying to sleep in. And if you’re really lucky, the airport will turn off the lights after midnight or so. Stanstead did. O’Hare didn’t.

So, circa 5:20 AM found me giving up on sleep and setting out to find breakfast and the Internet. Never before had I wished so much that I had a wireless card for my iBook; I’m definitely going to make that investment now. It took me nearly half an hour of wandering around the airport to find a place where I could plug in; I couldn’t use those data ports you see in pay phones because apparently they only work for local or toll-free access numbers. Eventually, I paid Laptop Lane through the nose to transmit my vital data. Although it was expensive, I still had a bit of a rush thinking about the fact that what I was doing was important enough to justify spending a relatively exorbitant amount on Internet time. I suppose if I had failed to get my section of the report to my colleagues, our grades (and therefore our graduation) might have been jeopardized. Maybe.

So the next few hours had me looking very much like a road warrior: typing on a laptop computer, making and receiving cellular telephone calls. I felt very important, and the project was completed as scheduled. I only missed a few activities at UIUC, and the rest of the visit weekend was great. At least until I was flying home on Sunday, whereupon O’Hare was beset by high winds just when I was trying to depart from Champaign-Urbana (which apparently the locals call C-U). The winds put a hold on all flights scheduled to fly into O’Hare for about an hour, so once again I was delayed. Fortunately, I was still able to make it back to KC that day.

The good news is that out of all of this travel, I finally synthesized a choice of graduate school. The winner is…

the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!! Since you all want to know my reasoning, I’ll explain a little. First and foremost, I was very impressed by the faculty at UIUC and excited by their research projects. Specifically, one Dr. Michael Strano does some really great work with my favorite molecule, the carbon nanotube. Besides this, all faculty members seemed genuinely interested in helping to develop their students’ careers (and they are particularly good at securing national fellowships for qualified students)--a very personable bunch. Of course, facilities and equipment available are top-notch. They have access to almost any instrument you could ever want/need, and some groups take field trips to national labs to use some of the exceptions to that statement. And although this decision isn’t really about money (I mean, on that basis I would have just accepted Dow Corning’s offer back in December and gone to work processing polycrystalline silicon), the cost of living in C-U is obviously lower than another top competitor, Berkeley. Example: It is not uncommon for students at UIUC to buy condos or houses. So start making your plans now; come visit me next year in…the middle of…Illinois. Well, maybe we can meet up in Chicago.