one time i moved to pennsylvania

Hi yall! So here’s the promised update.

Like many others on this blog, my past month has been commandeered by the forces of “Grad School” and “Moving.” There’s been a lot of tedious crap, like buying all my own insurance and wrangling with the PA driver’s registration people to get them to admit that I legally own the car that I legally own. But I did some graduate-level calculations and it turns out that the cool stuff about starting grad school and moving out on my own outweighs the bad. And as of last week I’m set up and good to go out here, so I’m pretty stoked.

I moved out here to central PA in mid-August, so I guess I’m almost up to my 1-month anniversary. I still don’t quite feel at home. I think the tipping point for when I’ve completely reset my home location is when I can completely zone out and just walk home. I cannot do this yet--I’ve walked/driven past my house a few times. Give me a week.

The move out here was decent. 1000 miles is longer than I’ve ever driven, and I was happy that our vehicles made it (and that my dad was able to do the return journey). I was driving a 93 Buick Century that my grandma gave me. I know, haha grandma car, but it was an excellent deal for yours truly because a) I got a free car, and b) my grandma is no longer a danger to the drivers of Illinois. You’re welcome Mark and Alfredo. The car itself is in almost perfect condition, and it has only about 37k miles. Additionally, I’ve found that I could reliably pick up women over the age of 45 with this car. This feature will likely go unused.

It turns out they ream you across the Indiana and Ohio turnpikes, fyi, I think I paid about $20 in tolls for those two states. Also, I know the Appalachians aren’t really super tall mountains, but driving on them in the dark, at the end of a 10-hour driving day, and surrounded by semi drivers with an apparant death wish is a tad harrowing. We did not crash, though, and were able to find our way to this weird outpost of civilization in the middle of nowhere known as State College.

State College is a small town, certainly not as small as Northfield, but still small. The weird part is that it’s very dense, and then drops off to nothingness at the feet of the mountains. So when you’re near campus or downtown, you feel like you are in a city. Also, the population of the city (non-undergrad) is listed on Wikipedia as being about 40k. There are about 38k undergrads on this campus. So you can imagine the overwhelming nature of anything they do. 

 Also, the whole “existence of a nightlife” thing kind of threw me too. There’s no shortage of bars and establishments with cover charges and scores of attractive people crammed in. And seeing all the house parties and frat parties around here on weekends (and not on weekends) has shown me that partying around here is really big business. PSU is the top party school in the nation, you know. We even had Tila Tequila and Tucker Max visiting last week, if you believe the school’s Daily Collegian. They also ran a hard-hitting story last week about some masked guy that was walking around masturbating in a girl’s dorm. I’m 98% sure this was not one of my roommates.

Speaking of which, I live in a decent house with two other astro grads. They’re both around 27, so I’m definitely the youngin around here. They’re both pretty good guys: one’s from India and one’s from Denver, and we get along well. The house atmosphere is orders of magnitude more subdued than Stadium 110, but I can cope with that. I will miss the 110 atmosphere though.

I’ve made some new friends out here too, which is always a good thing. All my fellow first years (there are 6 of us, 5 guys and 1 girl) are great, which is fortunate because I will be spending a considerable chunk of my next few years with them. We even share an office (right now), it’s friggin adorable let me tell you. Including my fellow first years, most of my friends are astro-related, but I’ve met a few other grads/undergrads and hopefully I can continue this so that I do not become an astronomy-obsessed hermit.

Of course, I’ve been doing a healthy amount of work since I’ve been here as well. I teach a night lab with 25 students, some of whom continually and incorrectly refer to me as “Professor Terrier.” At least in emails. This lab has been a lot of work and I’m not very good at teaching yet. I think with a few more weeks I’ll be alright; right now I’m kind of at a stage where I can either be coherent or time-efficient, but not both. My classes put out a lot of work as well… I’ve been doing lots of homework/reading. It’s all very interesting though, so I’m happy. Two of my courses are the core astro courses, one is a computer modeling course, and one is a seminar in exoplanets. I’ll be a friggin exoplanet exoexpert in a few months, try not to get too jealous. I’ll hopefully be starting research at some point this year also, but I haven’t talked to the people that I want to work with yet.  

So, I could write more here but it would probably bore you to tears. And I have to save some interesting stuff for next time. If you don’t want to read everything above, here’s the TL;DR: I moved to PA, I like State College, I like PSU, I’m making some new friends, there’s an assload of people here, and I’ve already started my ride on the speeding freight train of learning that is graduate school.

One final funny thought: the Collegian ran a story last week about guys in one of the frats cleaning a bathroom. They mixed bleach and ammonia, producing not a super-duper cleaning fluid but a cloud of chlorine gas that was five times the lethal concentration. No one died, but they did get sent to the hospital. PSU represent!  One things for certain: the campus paper at PSU kicks the snot out of the Carletonian.