Going where the sun be shinin’

Well, I’m one day removed from when I probably should have written this entry. . . I was tired and yet still had to study for a test yesterday. Once again, I’ll say ahead of time that this will likely be a gigantic entry, so no bitchin’ if your eyes get tired. Detailed here is the account of my trip to University of Georgia for the Microbiology dept. grad student recruitment weekend. . .



When we last left Amber. .
Yes, when we last left Amber, she was freaking out about all the crazy stuff she wanted to get done before hopping on a plane to Georgia. Let’s just say it all got taken care of. While I was worried that I wouldn’t get done with my lab before 11:30—which was when I wanted to eat lunch to leave for Canton-Akron Airport (CAK) to make it there on time—I got out of lab early, so all was well. Ate lunch with Dave and Sam, left for CAK in the Cak-mobile with Sam and company. Yahoo maps of course gave us much longer directions then we needed, but I still made it there in plenty of time—CAK is NOT a busy airport, and security was a breeze. Before I knew it I was on a plane and off for Georgia. I slept most of the time, but I woke up while we were flying over West Virginia, and got to see some of those lovely hills from my window seat.


Arriving at Atlanta Intl’ Airport, meeting my first UGA professor, and too much socializing
An hour and a half later, I was at the Atlanta Airport. The flight attendant greets me with “Oh she’s awake!” I sure hope so. It’s a looooong airport, and baggage claim is a far walk from my gate. But that’s ok. The little trains are packed, so I walk on the moving sidewalks all the way back, a walk that is really quite pleasant and reviving. I was told that Ellen, a professor at UGA would be waiting for me at the top of the escalator. After a ten-minute walk, I found her looking concerned and a little confused. I got right up beside her before she saw me, but greeted me with a smile once I introduced myself. We hop in the car and start the hour drive to Athens. Thankfully, she’s talkative enough that I don’t have to fish for conversation—something I am loathe to do. I’ve got to say, the traffic in Atlanta is amazing: in that it is packed all the way back to the airport. But we get to take the express lane, since apparently two people in a car counts as a high-occupancy vehicle. Zoom! off we go!

We get in Athens at nightfall, so I don’t see much, and what I do see is suburban. I’m starting to wonder if this place is as big as people claim, but mainly I’m focused on navigating (once again!) to Anna Karls’ House, for the big “Faculty, Student, and Prospective Student Mixer”

Emphasis on the word “big”

I walk in the door, and all around me are strangers crowded into small house. I’m talking way more than 40 people. And I don’t know any of them. And what’s even better, they give us nametags, but they don’t tell you who’s a student and who’s a prospective. . . I think they did it on purpose, but it leads to awkward situations when you guess someone is a prospective and they aren’t, or vice versa. So I don’t know anybody, I don’t’ know who my fellow prospective are, I’m tired, and hungry. Almost immediately, I meet my roommate: Sabrina from Florida and also Trinidad. She’s really nice and has a neat accent like having a cold but being happy about it. Eventually, I chat with a bunch of male professors, and confess to another professor that I’m not extremely social, only to have someone come up minutes later to tell her how good I am at socializing. So maybe I don’t suck in these situations? Who knows? I bail out early, get a ride back to the Georgia Center, and fall asleep watching the Michael Jackson Special at 10PM.



Interview Day One: Info, Tours, Talks, and Food Galore
My day starts bright an early at 6:30AM—I have to take a shower and breakfast is at 8AM. Down in the lobby, I wander around and locate the other students. Some greetings. I decide to stop clinging to my roommate’s side and sit with some other girls. They’re both rather quiet, and I think their names were Laura and Elizabeth. They are both tall and thinnish, both with glasses, long hair, pale skin. . . . and they have these low, serious voices. One is a master’s student, and the other is finishing work up at the CDC—the CDC for fucking sake! I get a little knot in my stomach as this impresses the hell out of me, and I realize this group IS more competitive than the one at Loyola. I won’t be a hotshot here. But I chill and we all ask eachother the requisite questions:

1) What other schools are you applying to?
2) Have you done any research?
3) What made you choose UGA?
4) Have you been to Georgia/THE SOUTH before?

Seriously. I’ll hear these questions many many times before the weekend is through. Some professor comes and sits with us, and they (not me) begin talking shop about science and research and all I can think is: it’s too goddamned early in the morning for science. And they talk science better than I can. I feel like everything I say is dull and confusing. . . .yuck.

Then it’s off to the Biological Sciences Building. I meet my grad student guide, Jeff, who works in Eric Stabb’s lab: Eric works on Vibrio fischeri, that bacteria I’m a fan of. Jeff is cool, and so I’m relieved. Ironically he’s from University of Wisconsin at Madison. As is, apparently, half the microbiology department. . .but I digress

One of the faculty members gives us the layout of the program—less coursework and more teaching than at Loyola, decent pay, decent fees for everything. . .ok, so far so good!

The day goes basically like this: I visit two professors in the morning, have lunch, and visit two more professors in the afternoon, and go on a little campus tour as well. MUCH more relaxed than Loyola. I meet a guy who was HEAD of the CDC branch of parasitology, who goes regularly to Kenya to work on a tiny parasite called Schistisomiasis. Eric is totally cool, relaxed, and funny, and I like his grad students tremendously—their lab overlooks the football stadium.

Lunch is delicious: I have Louisiana Seafood Cakes with a tasty mustard sauce and Sweet Tea to drink (In honor of my Georgian roommate, Kat). It is as lunch that I meet Patrick, who has to be a direct clone of my friend Chewie, although a bit heavier than him. I’ll pretend I have a familiar face to work with now.
The afternoon interviews go well too: I meet a lady doing cool work on Marine Microbes, and another who studies fermentation, biotechnology, and the gut microflora of stream invertebrates. All totally cool stuff, and everyone is nice. They talk a lot more about their research here at UGA, as compared to the faculty at Loyola.

Then we all hop in a 15-person van to go on a guided tour of UGA. Our tourguides are. . . interesting. First off, they’re underclassmen. Secondly, the one who does most of the guiding, a blocky little surferish dude, is a sophomore finance major—the most scientific words to come out of his mouth are “Double Helix Thingy.” He also tells us which bars he frequents—interesting since he’s not even close to 21. But that’s ok J.

Originally, UGA was going to be built in Watkinsville, GA. However, the founding fathers thought it unacceptable to put their institution in a town which had a bar; a bar where women showed their ankles no less! So they settled on a piece of pastureland and named it Athens. You can still see the wrought-iron fences built to keep the livestock off campus. The irony is that Watkinsville is now a dry town, and Athens is . . .. Not? The campus is rather big—ok, bigger than Hiram at least—and the whole terrain is rather hilly, which I like. The trees are already starting to burst into pink blossoms, and there are daffodils and crocuses and forsythia blooming. I’m trying really hard not to let my cravings for spring sway my impressions too much, which is hard to accomplish when it’s currently snowing and freezing in Hiram.

We recruits are given a good amount of time to rest before dinner, which is at 6:30PM. We gather in the lobby at 6:00PM, and have a fantastic time, finding out where everyone hails from, what they’re doing here, what kind of research they’ve been doing. We get the gossip on what our interviewers were like. We each share our all-time favorite microbe, with answers ranging from my Vibrio fischeri, to Gonorrhea, to Sacchromyces cerviscea (my horrific spelling of “yeast”), Borrelia burgdorfi (lyme disease), and that workhorse of the lab, E.coli. It’s a great moment in my life, sitting with all these people who love microbes too, who have the same kinds of passions and experiences. I also locate the fellow gamers in the group, and we plan to find the gaming store later on.


Dinner, Migraines, and the Night life of Athens
We make our way to the dining room of the conference center, and are immediately divided up to different tables, evenly distributed so that we can have some faculty and grad students at each table. Two guys from a department other than microbiology are there, and they try to tempt me to come do research in their lab, although they are specifically there to recruit the two OSU kids, Theresa and Brian. Some of the faculty, I’m discovering, aren’t very good at social situations, and kindof sit and look uncomfortable at social events. I vow to at least pretend to be comfortable, even if I’m despising small talk. I’ll give myself credit for at least being able to look extremely interested in things when I’m not. Also at my table is a girl who’s stayed pretty quiet during the whole visit, never saying much of anything, never making eye contact, and generally remaining reclusive. We have to listen to two 40 minute talks before they’ll let us eat dinner, which would be ok, since we are allowed to eat the rolls they’ve put out. But as I look at the slides, I realize I can’t see a quarter of the screen well out of my right eye. At first I figure it’s the blindspot we’ve been taught about in Neuroscience, but soon I realize this blindspot is in creasing in size and brightness. If anyone has ever had a migraine before, they may know what I’m talking about. It’s like if you close your eye and apply pressure to your eyelid—you’ll see undulating lights. That’s what I see even with my eyes open, and I fight off nausea and pain to make it through dinner. The quiet girl gives me two ibuprofen, and I am relieved to feel the pain subsiding, as I get ready to go out for the evening.

For an evening out bar-hopping, I decide to change out of my rigid pinstripe pants and black turtleneck and go with comfy jeans, my black Lenore t-shirt, and my girly little red shirt with puffy sleeves that hooks in the front. And of course let my hair down. Ahhh. True to geek form, Brian—who has been wearing a knit cap and jeans all day—is pysched that I have a Lenore t-shirt. I guess I pass the cool test for now.

After some arrangements are made, the grad students each take some of us and we head to downtown Athens. I’m sharing Greg’s car with Bhijal, who is from New York somewhere, but has been working in one of the labs at UGA for about a year. We park the car, and make our way to the main strip. It’s packed with a mostly young crowd—in all stages of dress from evening gowns down to corduroys. The streets are full of people, the air is warm, and there are lights and signs everywhere inviting us in. . . Greg leads us down the street, and we turn off into a dark alley taken out of any comic book / Law and Order episode you like. I’m just starting to get concerned as we make it to a door with a neon sign above it:

“Nowhere Bar”

Apparently, Nowhere Bar is where the “townies” hang out mostly, and so there’s a big mix of ages ranging from 20’s to 50’s in the bar. Bhijal buys the first pitcher with his chosen beer, Sierra Nevada. We sit down with a girl named Franny and her cousin. I have no idea why we were sitting with them, but I do remember that Franny does most of the talking. She’s some sort of probational officer, and she smokes a lot. But I like her, because despite the attitude she’s really nice and doesn’t treat us like freaks for being prospective grad students. Erin (another prospective chica, who matches me in height), Bhijal, and myself go around the wall to the pool hall, and those two play pool since I refuse to embarrass myself this way. They play doubles against an obviously better duo, but we still have a fine time laughing and acting “cool.” Soon, it’s off to the next bar. . .

“City Bar”
This place is far more upscale. If you could call Nowhere Bar a countryish, down-home kindof place, City Bar is infinitely more dark and sleek, and the clientele is well-dressed and groomed. Erin and I buy Coronas, and make a mess trying to flip over the bottles to that the lime floats up to the bottom of the bottle. We get tired of that and go off to “Classic Bar” (what names!) which is playing LOUD music and is packed—by now it’s prime drinking time apparently. We head downstairs, stand around for awhile, and realize it’s waaay too packed. A group of us egress and make our way to the final destination:

“The Village Idiot” (formerly known as Rumrunners)
This place is tiny, tiny, tiny. But it’s clean, and relatively empty. The bartenders are these two cute ladies, one altnernativey blond chick with spiky hair, and the other rave-y sort of asian chick. I am on a mission to try Sweetwater Blue, which Greg claims is a local brew which tastes like blueberries. They don’t have it, so I try to get Labatts, but end up with Bass. Bass has a sort of meaty, yeasty undertone, but I actually end up liking it too. We (Greg, Brian, Theresa, Bhijal, and Alexia and probably more) head upstairs to the tables which overlook the downstairs. Alexia (or Alexis, or Alexandria, or something like that) is apparently the daughter of a famous science fiction illustrator, and she’s absolutely smashingly pretty, complete with blond hair and manicure. I’m envious! Theresa, Brian, and Alexia have been doing shots and drinking for most of the night, and so they make quite a little group. Theresa, like Alexia, is tall and thin, but she has light red hair instead of blonde—and they both tower a bit over Brian. Theresa—who is rather smashed by this point, is convinced she has “Lesbian” written on her forehead, and regales us with her harrowing account of escape from a girl who was hitting on her. The poor girl had apparently invited Theresa over, and once there was trying to apply lip balm to T’s lips with a Q-tip. Backed into a corner by the girl, Theresa grabbed the q-tip and stuck it in the girl’s nose, and ran away. That was her big story for the evening. And soon after, we all return home, to fall asleep at 2AM—breakfast is at 8:45 AM.

Interview Day Two: Poster Sessions & A sunny afternoon in Athens

Ok, I really don’t feel like talking much about the poster session. I have opted to dress all in black, for some reason, but feel cool for doing so. Almost everyone else has given up dressing nicely for the weekend, but I hold on just a little bit longer. We all walk around and check out the research that’s going on in everyone’s labs—presented in poster form. I get to talk with Dr. Weigel, who is a german studying thermophillic bacteria (bacteria that live at high temperatures), and also to Dr. Denny, from the botany dept. I think, trying to recruit students to his lab.

As soon as possible, I changed to jeans and Brian, Theresa, and I made up the Ohio Contingent in Grad Student Dawn’s car, as we drove through some apartment complexes and chatted about life in Athens. Rent is cheap, and it seems like you’re better off living a bit out of campus area. Brian seems very disgruntled about this idea, because he digs walking everywhere. Hey, I can dig it. We head downtown to meet up with James (another grad student) for lunch; we pick up Alexia on the way. The resteraunt we settle on is “Clocked” which is a cute, tiny diner place. The lights are covered in cotton balls and silk flowers—they look like flowery clouds hanging from the ceiling. Everything seems to have that coffee shop feel about it—crafty and original. I get a Great Meteor Burger, which comes with bacon and feta cheese. .. yummmmmmmm!!

We then start our wandering of Athens during the day. We go to a used music store, and a comic book store, and a crazy miscellaneous store which had everything from wigs and rental costumes to hello kitty stuff, to books on growing mushrooms. On that lovely, sunny day, we don’t even have to wear coats, and there are people everywhere still. Hippies, yuppies, Goths, kids that looked like they belong in Weezer. . . . all kinds of people. Even Bathrobe Billy, who is a campus character for his continual wearing of a bathrobe. In the end, we’re sitting at table outdoors of the café Blue Sky, sipping mochas and coffees.


During the day’s travels, I was able to acquire the location of the nearest gaming store from the proprietor of Wuxtry’s Comic Book Store. Brian and I make a pilgrimage to the little shop, which is a couple minute’s walk from the Georgia Center. The guy who runs the place looks grumpy, and has a gigantic grey beard and long hair to match. My kind of people, I say. His store was mainly a book-based gaming store, filled with White Wolf, D&D, and other goodies. I decided to treat myself to a copy of “Blood-Dimmed Tides,” a sourcebook for ocean campaigns in White Wolf. It rules. Brian was disappointed that there weren’t more figurine-based games, and I had to stifle any wise-ass comments about that. Having scoped out the game store scene in Athens, I was satisfied.



One last evening in the classical City: Dinner, beer, and beer
The entire group met up in the lobby again—dinner was going to be out on the town and organized by the grad students. Eventually we decided to go to Wild Wings—which of course sold chicken wings. Ironically, no one bought any. I got a delicious “terrific Thai Chicken Salad” which had a tasty peanut-sauce dressing. The place was cavernously huge, like a mead hall. Our Chandler-Bing-Lookalike prospective student Matt was compulsively wiping the tables. Then it was time to move again. . . off to a party thrown by the Men’s Rugby team, because free beer would be there, and apparently Uptown bar—where most of the group was headed—was full of underage drinkers and some of us were persuaded to try elsewheres.

Have you ever been to a party thrown by a Rugby team? I hadn’t, obviously. The place wasn’t packed, but there was indeed free beer. The bar was long instead of wide, and we were at the entrance side, while the bulk of the party was at the back end of the bar, surrounding a spiral staircase. On that spiral staircase was one blitzed rugby player, leading the crowd in a drinking song. I’ve included a link to one of the best ones: http://www.uidaho.edu/clubs/womens_rugby/RugbyRoot/rugby/Songs/park.html

The crowd was wild and the guy practically fell off the staircase several times during his bouts of screaming and thrusting around. I felt like Dave Atell on Insomniac Hour, moving from bar to bar and seeing all kinds of craaaazy shit. But we got bored soon and reunited with the crew at Uptown Bar—which seemed, to me, to be a really nice place which looked more like a saloon than a typical bar. I decided to take Bhijal’s advice and get a NewCastle beer. It was a brown ale and tasted a bit like brown bread, but in a tasty way, yarrr. By this time, Erin, my drinking partner in crime, and I were pretty buzzed, so we cut ourselves off and just acted silly.

Soon it was time to move again, and our final destination was La Cinta, I believe. This place had a central bar and lots of tables. Moderately crowded. Erin and I took to the bathroom together, which was good since some smiley creepy guy kept coming back to check on us. The girls in line for the bathroom were nice though—I got a true sense of comradery from them, despite our obvious tipsy-ness. I wanted to hug everyone. Erin, Matt, and myself formed a contingent to go home right then and there, because it was already 1AM. Chewie-Clone Patrick was ready to call it a night too, so that’s just what we did. Drunk for the second night in a row, I made it home and fell sound asleep.

Early, early in the morning, Dr. Karls picked us up to take us to the airport. Dr. Anna Karls is from the south, and her accent is soft. I had joked last night that one of us was going to have to sit shotgun with her and keep her company during the trip. . . and apparently that someone was going to be me. It was nice though—it’s so nice to be able to chat with professors as if they weren’t your teachers. They are interesting people, no doubt.

And before I knew it, I was home, in the frozen north.

What do I think about UGA? I loved it. Hands down. I wanted more time to roam around the streets and check out everything. I wanted there to be leaves on the trees. It was spring there. landscaping was dense and wild Everyone was really nice, the research was fascinating, the buildings were really nice, the downtown was a wonderland of people and shops and restaurants . . . . and of course there were the bars. It’s not the drinking that made them great, it was the chance to be out on a warm night surrounded by young people, with bartenders to take care of you and music to keep your spirits up. It seemed like a safe place to have a good time, and really be young while you still can. And that certainly doesn’t seem like a bad thing. . . .