Northwestern
August 22, 2006
Northwestern
So NU is kinda spread out, which didn’t make me too happy… and there’s a street or something that runs into the University, and so that was a little weird. We finally found the building, and it was hot and I was sweaty and just tired of the whole thing… it was a good 15-20 min walk in the sun to get to that building. NU is… cute. The ‘departments’ look like little houses on the side of the road. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the signs in front of them. Initially I thought the ‘houses’ housed the professors in that department…
The size was the main thing that I didn’t like so much about NU… and the tour only added to that distaste, because our tour guide really wasn’t that great. And I know for sure she was one of the better tour guides they had.
But before I get to that… we first saw this info session, where the guy did the traditional powerpoint thing and stuff… utterly boring. I drew squiggly lines on the back of my hand, waiting for it to get over.
Dad was all happy about it and kept comparing NU to U Chicago, saying how NU was sooo much more professional, and how the admins guy at U Chicago ‘took it easy’ by making the whole thing more conversational and question-answer style. Mom and I knew it was the complete opposite, and we glowered at him behind his back.
So now to the awful tour. Our tour guide… was very hyper. Not hyper in the visible way, but the quiet sort of hyper that only comes out when you hear the person speak. She rattled out fact after fact, threw in very few anecdotes, rambled about class sizes, where to eat… the one place where I felt a sense of who she really was, was when she took us into a classroom (which was a nice classroom, and I really liked it) and told us in the middle of her ramble a small anecdote about one of her favorite classes, taught by an incoming professor.
Dad really liked her. He probably thought her long, exhaustive speech was an economic approach to the tour. She got in as much information as possible. Commendable. Mmhm.
So we left a little early to make this engineering session, which saved the entire day… because until then, I didn’t understand what the heck NU was about, and every impression I got of it was negative.
The session was with a professor in the engineering department. I was very impressed with him. He engaged with my father, but he didn’t ignore me when he was talking- a lot of counselors just see how many questions my dad has and then they just start addressing him with all of the answers and completely forget that I’ll be the person who’ll attend the darn university! LOL. This guy was smart, too. Like street smart as well was book smart. I’ll explain that in a bit.
He was great- he gave an example of the beginning exercise they make the students at NU engineering school do (they give them a bunch of pieces to make the remote of this race car) and how they don’t teach the laws involved in engineering, but they make the students understand them.
The street smart thing I said earlier… Professor Carr talked about job opportunities, and how every company that NU students work for reply with exclamations of how knowledgeable the students are in other fields of engineering other than just their specialty, and how prepared they are for the workspace. He talked about the CoOp (remind you of something, Shirley? :D hint: the second email thing we worked on after the LWSD one busted) program, where students spend their fifth year working at a company, getting paid about 60-70 thousand (seriously? Nice!), and how students can be hired by these places later if the guys were pleased w/ their work. And how it gives them a year of experience working in the field before graduating.
We mentioned the UW bioengineering department to him and he said it was a good department, but that he thinks that NU’s is better. LOL. He just blatantly said ‘NU is better, though.’ Haha. I wonder if he resents UW though because his daughter chose to do chemical engineering there instead of at NU… hmmm.
And just when things were great, dad had to open his big mouth and say ‘yeeeeahh, my daughter and I got in an argument over U Chicago… I told her that any school without an engineering department isn’t good’ (or something like that) and the guy said ‘they wouldn’t go anywhere near engineering- it’s too practical. Ever since ___ became their new president, no way would they touch engineering or anything like it. They only like theory, and they’re… actually proud of it. And I don’t understand it.” He said something like that, and he said how part of it was to encourage students to love learning for the sake of learning, and he said that NU makes a lot of PHDs so ‘obviously we’re not hurting them in that aspect’… which was a good point. Though I’m unsure about the whole theory thing with U Chicago. I know that they have tshirts that say ‘that’s all well in practice, but what about in theory?’ and that theory is really imp to them… but I really hope I could still take engineering classes if I went there! I need to find the website of that tour guide I had and ask him…
We took a bus back… and luckily there was a stop right across from our hotel, so we didn’t have to miss the plane due to the traffic on the way back. Dad made a huge deal about that- how I should have known there was a bus near our hotel, how I should have done better research, blah blah blah.
We got to the airport, and I had this Uno mini pizza thing, even though I knew it risked dad giving me a lecture about losing weight. But I couldn’t leave Chicago w/o having some sort of pizza done sort of in the Chicago style (it wasn’t really really deep dish, but it was slightly deep?)
I got on the plane… and we took a 1.5 hr flight to Philly!