JHU Visit

For those of you who missed the first post, I just finished visiting Johns Hopkins University.

 Let me just start out by saying I had four interviews! Four! That's four times as many as I was expecting.

That said I think they all went fine. I had three interviews that I expected: Yu, Mao, and Searson. Then I had one that I had never expected, or really even knew who I was that I was interviewing with. I interviewed with Herrera. The two most positive that I felt were Yu and Herrera, not only was I very interested in their research they seemed very interested in mine, which was exciting. One of them even offered to let me read their manuscript that they are working on, which I will have to request in the coming week.

I think I am the most interested in working for Searson's group, their research is the most applicable to what I am interested in, and I meshed better with his grad students than any others. So hopefully in the coming weeks I will hear back from them in a positive manner as they offer a $30,200 stipend!! That's huge! and will definitely let me live well, especially in Baltimore

So over all I had a nice time. The campus is beautiful, while my pictures certainly don't do it justice maybe I can give you a general idea. All of the sidewalks are brick with marble, and all of the buildings are brick with marble as well. If you think of your stereotypical university, that's what JHU looks like. It was very pretty. What I wasn't a huge fan of was related to safety, Baltimore isn't the safest place in the world, but it has splotches of safe neighborhoods, and splotches of not so safe neighborhoods. Now you would think that means that uptown is relatively safe, and then downtown isn't, but it doesn't. Baltimore is divided up into neighborhoods, and they can be as small as a single block. That means that one block can be safe, and the next can be one that you don't really want to walk through, especially at night.

I think the part that I found funny, and not really applicable to me, was that their only D1 sport is lacrosse, to the point that their football team plays on their lacrosse field. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Overall I think that I would be happy here, depending on whose group I get accepted into, as that's how you get in. I really like that that you don't get a general admission to the department, you get admitted to a specific research group, or multiple. If you don't get an advisor you don't want, you don't go. So you know more or less exactly what you will be doing when you are admitted.