Just back from visiting Houghton and the campus of Michigan Tech, which means I only have one more grad school visit before the big choice. It might be hard; I’ve met some really great people in the past two and heard about interesting prospects for MS projects.

Turns out MT isn’t cold all the time – we just had three beautiful, sunny and fairly warm days, which I was once again assured is not the norm. The interviews were tiring, as always, but I felt I got a good handle on the feel of the department, and luckily on Friday the students scheduled for my last meeting took us out to play frisbee instead of talk. There are only so many times you can give a “what I want to be when I grow up” spiel before your brain turns into mush.

Possibilities for Tech research are falling into the remote sensing and volcano seismology category, which could be cool even though I haven’t had much experience with either and would be playing catch-up with physics and math classes. I briefly considered the Masters International Peace Corps program they run, which sends you out to a volcano as part of the Peace Corps for two years, but I don’t have any experience in Spanish (most of the students go to Central or South America), and I wasn’t quite ready to commit to three or four years to get a Masters. (Because of the way the Peace Corps schedules their training and deployment, some students will end up spending a year taking their masters classes, an extra semester waiting around, and possibly another semester afterward writing their thesis. That’s a bit too long for me, not to mention that I’m too chicken to move to another country for several years. Maybe later, but not right now – I’ll stick with moving to a different state for the moment.)

I’ll post some photos of the campus and Houghton once I get home and locate the camera in the rapidly-accumulating pile of travel detritus that my desk has become. (And, I suppose I should explain what Broomball is for people who haven’t heard of it.)