This weekend is visiting weekend for the accepted graduate students in the Cognitive, Brain and Cognition and Visual Cognition and Human Performance divisions of the Psych department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. This is where a whole bunch of awkward prospective graduate students come out to Champaign and we try to convince them that even though there are no buildings over a few stories, no trees outside of campus (only soy and corn), no hills over 10 feet and the town smells a little funny when the Kraft plant is cooking up something or other, that they should come here for graduate school. The usual cited reasons are: the faculty are great (seriously), the graduate students can be fun (sometimes), and the program is ranked really highly (if you buy the ranking system).
Along with all this convincing, the graduate students and faculty try to get a sense of what the visiting students are like as people - mostly whether they are going to be good collaborators and not creep out anyone or piss anyone off too much. There are a few opportunities specifically designed for this - the first being the faculty prospective interviews where much of the talk is about research interests, then the more important events happen like the Friday graduate student happy hour (which I'm partly responsible for this year) and the faculty/grad student prospective dinner on Saturday night (and sometimes a wild grad student party after that). At these events we really try to figure out whether we want these people as class mates. Sometimes people do things that make you cringe to think what they would be like as a class mate and you pray they go somewhere else. Sometimes people are so obnoxious that faculty members who the prospective is interested in working with will tell them that even though they've been accepted into the program that they have no money or room for them in the lab.
We've all run across people who have done these things to manage to piss everyone off at interviews as well as, I'm sure, doing some of these things ourselves.
Let's hear your stories!
Did you do anything horribly embarrassing - say something insulting about a professors research while they were standing right there and you didn't realize who they were? Throw up in a professors plant at a dinner party?
Or did you have to host a complete and utter jerk who made your life a living hell in the only two nights that they were there?
-edit-
Ohh yeah i forgot to mention this post where A Gentleman's C discusses a new trend in graduate interviews where the interviewee brings their parents or significant other to the actual interview where they actually participate.
- Log in to post comments
Remeber to tell your Grad Guests not to drive anywhere with an Illini basketball player!
But the BIG question... what is going to happen to Chief Illiniwick? Will he be opening a casino?
Not something I did, but while I was a grad student, during our "Friday night social" at a local bar, a current grad student and the wife of another grad student got in a fight, and we all got thrown out of the bar.
None of the students in that interview group chose to come to my school that year... wonder why??
ours is about to start -- today, really, they're coming in -- so I don't have any stories yet. I'm sort of in charge of it, too. We actually have a few people from UIUC coming to visit!
Last year I heard someone ran out of the building during a lab tour because he got crazy/sick of being in the basement for hours. I wasn't surprised he decided not to come here (the cognitive labs are in the basement so you sort of have to be someone who doesn't mind not having windows.)
Michigan is like Illinois in that they accept you first, so it's not like we can say to the faculty, "that person is a jerk; don't accept him"; all we can do is tell the guy he's a jerk to his face and tell him to go somewhere else. Last year everyone was nice and I liked them all, and then some of my favorites from that visit ended up matriculating. I hope the people are as cool this year, because I won't know how to react to someone who's a complete asshole.
I came across this book in a local bookshop the other day that you may find interesting; it is relevant to your post.
I want my work to buy it for me, but my boss doesn't want the title to be seen by the higher ups :-)
There was an ill-fated wrestling match between a current student and a "recruit" a few years back at UM. During a potluck dinner. At the Neuroscience Chair's house.
I'm just sad that the "100% faculty reimbursement for alcohol" policy only lasted one year. But what a glorious year it was!
I haven't got to experience the glory of post-grad visits yet.
I did apply to Oxford for undergrad though. At interviews at St Hugh's College, 9:00 in the morning, the first serious question Kim Plunkett asks me is "what's 2 to the power of 5?" I don't even know what he's asking me until he writes it down in math-speak on a piece of paper.
After which I realize that I don't know the answer.
So the sensible thing would be to quickly add up 2*2*2*2*2, using fingers if necessary. Unfortunately, I'm in full deer-caught-in-headlights mode at this point, so it somehow seems better to say that I don't know the answer, though I do know how to compute it.
Following this, I manage to relax, and when I'm next asked what the probability is of getting 5 tails in a row, I happily provide the right answer at once... At which point Plunkett points out that what I did was actually more difficult than calculating 2 to the power of 5... and he gives me another go at it.
Unfortunately, that made me drop right back into deer-in-headlights mode.
Strangely, I did not receive an offer.
Here we invite prospectives before they are accepted. Thursday night typically involves a party at a current grad student's house, followed by a full day of interviews, and finally a party at a faculty member's house on Friday night.
Last year, we had a prospective student get so drunk on Thursday night that he threw up all over the bathroom, took off all his clothes, and then passed out. He actually made it to the interviews the next day, but needless to say did not receive an offer.
Prospective undergrads at Caltech are invited to campus for a "pre-frosh" weekend, to help them to decide if they want to attend. On my weekend there, I was taken to a restaurant by an upper-classman. Upon leaving the restaurant, I notice a very loud drunken man making a scene in the bar. My companion said, "Oh yes, that will be your freshman physics professor!" rather proudly, I thought, under the circumstances.
It turned out this was a moderately well-known person, who was indeed our freshman physics professor and quite well-known for his drunken antics (he was banned from the faculty club). Let's just say, learning about harmonic oscillators was far more interesting than it might have been otherwise (at 9am). He was not a bad professor and the potential for "unusual" occurrences definitely kept us showing up to class on time!
"wild grad student party"!!!
In Champaign?
Whaaaaaaa ..??
Slightly OT, but UIUC provided me with one of my favorite sweatshirts. It said (with appropriate illustrations):
Campus
Corn
Cows
You gotta love the drive.
I actually had a wonderful time when I went to an interview weekend this spring. No horror stories at all. We stayed in a good hotel, and got really nice food. It was great. Except for the part where I didn't get in :(
ohh that sucks... what are your plans now? what school?