So, there I was, an undergrad in England, and I needed to get to Caltech by september.
Flying seemed best (this is non-trivial, since a friend of mine faced with a similar dilemma went for the motorcycle to Mosow, then trans-Siberian train followed by tramp freighter to LA via Japan approach - ok he then took a Greyhound to Ohio, so not quite the same).
I was in the south of England, so Gatwick seemed like a good choice.
Catch is that flights cost money. And I was an undergraduate.
Now, I was on a full grant, which actually mean something back then, and I had good summer jobs every year since I was 16, so I was debt free, unlike most of my compatriots. Just.
Why I was in the UK not Iceland that summer is complicated, but I had free housing on campus and the timing of undergrad finals and start of grad school made it impractical to go do fieldwork back home like previous couple of summers.
First the flight: turned out Courage Breweries was running a "make up a slogan for our crap lager competition", they were launching the brand in the US. Seriously.
So I rounded up some associates, and we filled in several hundred forms, with unique (and, may I say, very good) catchy slogans and sent them in. In my name.
I won.
Did I ever thank y'all?
Thanks!
Turns out someone at Courage realised the whole concept sucked and they pulled the campaign, so essentially no other bar distributed the entry forms. But they still had to honour the entries they received.
I had not at that point seen Real Genius or heard of the Page hack of the McDonald sweepstakes, True Story. But, clearly I had some of the essential idea needed to get to Caltech.
The first price was a return flight to New York (well, Newark) on Virgin Airlines!
So, I was off, with an amusing sendoff. (Going away parties for transatlantic trips should never be the night before the flight... trust me on this).
Now, on US flights, you're allowed two suitcases. I had two, big, suitcases.
Virgin decided they were overweight, and the charges were just a little bit less than an economy ticket would have been anyway.
Bastards.
Have never flown Virgin Airways since.
From Newark, a $99 People Express flight to LAX, a shuttle to Pasadena, then a taxi to campus.
Bastard taxi driver took me on ride, I knew it at the time, but I was jet lagged, exhausted, had shitloads of luggage and no way of proving it. So I paid about twice too much and was deposited at the housing office on morning of move-in day. Yay.
It was sunny. My apartment was on the other side of campus, and the housing person most unhelpfully told me there was no support mechanism for getting there. She was lying, the only unpleasant staff I ever met at Caltech. She was fired a few years later for embezzling student social funds... Turns out there were carts for luggage, and people willing to help new arrivals, as at all sane institutions, as I found out later that week.
Anyway, I trundle across the (small) campus. Find the place (top floor of course) walk in, and a sleepy looking woman looks at me in confusion. Cool, roomies. (My flat in England had been thorougly co-ed). I spot my room, nod hello and make for it, just as I unlock and pop the door, the woman in the kitchen starts saying something about "they're still there..." and I open the door onto a deeply asleep post-coital entwined couple in a state of dishabile.
Ah, university life.
I closed the door gently and went to see if they had coffee in the kitchen.
Turns out that the new graduate apartments were not quite constructed on time, so the older graduate students hadn't all moved out... embarrassing that.
So... I left my suitcases there (I later marched in the Doo Dah Parade with the woman in the kitchen) and walked back to the housing office.
I think I had achieved Zen at that point.
I was sent to see the "foreign student officer" while this was sorted out, who very helpfully insisted I be moved to the old "foreign student dorm", so I could "be with people I'd be comfortable with".
Lovely old lady, totally batty.
I wanted my f@#%â¬â¹%ing apartment with palms and avocado trees and mountain view (what mountain view?! I could see no mountain anywhere), as promised in the brochure. Not the "foreign student" ghetto.
Well, it turns out they had an overflow unit for late arrivals and exchange students, so I was put there, it was available immediately. Flatmates were two english set theorists with better music collection and dress sense than me (Hi!) and an MIT astronomer. There were a lot of MITers around. I didn't understand until I visited MIT a decade later.
There I was, and now I only had to survive until the first paycheck.
I had thought of that, I did the natural thing and before I left the UK, I went to my bank (good old Midland), and told them that I would like an unsecured personal loan and, by the way, I was leaving the country.
"Certainly, sir. How much would sir be requiring?"
It took three years to pay that loan, but it was worth it.
But, after Virgin, and the taxi driver, I now had exactly $500 to live on until I got my first TA check.
It was an interesting month. The money went into a local savings and loan, which was of course promptly taken over by Wells Fargo. Steinn was introduced to Ramen Noodles (no "Smash" mash potatoes or cheap bangers in LA) and reacquainted myself with creative things to do with boiled rice.
Palms. Avocado trees. No mountain though.
That is how you get to Caltech for grad school.
About two weeks after I got there I walked into the kitchen one morning and promptly, and literally, fell on my ass: there, as promised, right outside the window was the Mountain - the Santa Ana had come and cleared the smog.
Oh, and you should have a near perfect academic record at university, and ace the GREs.
Good recommendation letters and research experience should also help.
- Log in to post comments
This is some sort of inverse of my 1968 anecdote: how to leave Caltech after the first undergraduate quarter.
So, I'd flown to Pasadena, from New York, at age 16, to start at Caltech on full scholarship. After the first quarter, where I'd tested out of several Math and Physics classes before they began, I wanted to fly home to visit my parents and siblings.
I had a $90 "student stand-by" ticket from LAX to JFK.
They wanted to see ID to honor my ticket. Caltech student ID wasn't good enough for them. I had no credit cards. I had no driver's license. I had no passport. They refused to honor my ticket, and said that no other carrier would, either.
Fortunately, they were lying. I walked to another airline, who accepted the Caltech ID after a phonecall.
Later, to save money, I mastered the art of hitchhiking. In fact, I established Jonathan Vos Post's Law of American hitchhiking: the mean number of rides to get a distance D goes as Log D.
-- Jonathan Vos Post
http://www.jimwestergren.com/greatest-nerd-of-all-times-jonathan-vos-po…
That's interesting, Jonathon. I come from NZ, where the log D rule doesn't work very well, probably because there are almost no motorways in the country, and the geography varies. The number of rides required goes up linearly after a certain distance. For small distances of course it depends very much on the location.
Steinn, what was the "foreign student dorm" they stuck you in? I lived in M-J house for 2 years (house Kaiser for the 2nd).
I can't remember - the "foreign student" person was nice but not very organised.
She told me "all" the foreign students were always put in one of the east side grad houses (I wanna say the one in the middle), so they'd feel more at home being "with their kind".
Which made me want to run away screaming...
I think it was the one in the middle - does that help? It wasn't all foreigners, but it was true they had a definite preponderance of foreign grad students.
I did not go to the houses, I got an overflow apartment in Catalina, a quad. Stayed in Catalina the whole time, first in the old Part I, then moved to a new double in Part III when they built it.
Yep, the middle one was M-J (Mosher Jorgensen).
I had a lot of fun there. The vast majority of foreign students were from China, and typically only stayed for about a year before moving into an apartment. But, there was a substantial cadre of people who lived there for a long time (largely because the rent was ridiculously cheap), and they were a hell of a lot of fun. We used to throw raucous parties which lasted until either president Everhart (whose residence was about 20 meters away) or undergrads in the neighboring dorms would call the cops on us. (Launching a volley of rockets at the president's house while screaming "F*** you Tom Everhart!!" probably didn't help.)
In terms of the building and the room, it was probably the crappiest place I've ever lived. But the people there were great, really helped my transition to grad school.
Americans tend towards a love-hate relationship with "foreign students." The universities as such love them -- they provide a major part of tuition revenue. But tuition is a fraction, typically a quarter or third, of overhead costs per capita. Grad students on fellowhips, teaching assistants, and postdocs are paid, albeit far far less than faculty.
At Caltech, since my day in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the undergraduate population and grad student population have crept upwards, as has the percentage of women. But the number of postdocs has tripled.
The "overflow apartments" on Catalina did not exist in my day. One lived on campus, or found someplace unaffiliated with Caltech off campus. I had, at first, a nice rented room with kitchen, and a bathroom shared with the student upstairs. Rent was $60 per month (sixty!). That place got torn down to build the 210 freeway. Sometimes a bunch of students would pool their money and rent a large apartment suite, or a house. The big old rented houses were the sites of memorable parties, and the aforementioned communes. Caltech itself sponsored an "academic commune" in a house they owned on Holliston, with Planetary Scientist Andrew Ingersoll (and wife and kids) as faculty, some grad students, some undergrads, and unadffiliated-otherwise Significant Others.
The statistics on hitchhiking in New Zealand (where I have a sister-in-law) are skewed by the partition into North and South Islands, and by sheep which not only outnumber people by an order of magnitude, but rarely pick up passengers, and, when they do, are dull conversationalists.
In the USA, I hitchhiked 30,000 miles in a year. My record, tied several times, was East Coast to West Coast, or vice versa, in 3.5 days.