What the Future May Hold

Spring break is in about a week and because of one professor in particular and work I'm going to be quite busy until then. Yesterday I had a few hours free and decided to get a jump start on a difficult and potentially time consuming lab project that's due next Wednesday. After only about three hours of work I got part one (of two) working properly and was able to check off with my professor. Let me tell you, I felt pretty good about getting that done, so when I ran into some friends who were going downtown for cheap tacos I went along and did some relaxing, which was amazing. Around this time I started thinking "Man, the only way my day could be better is if I had an email from a grad school or employer waiting for me."

I called UMN and UIUC about a week and a half ago, and they both said I should be notified by the middle of March, so in the last week or so I've been reminded a few times of filling out those cereal box offers when I was little (like <13 years old). I collected all the UPC symbols then laboriously addressed an envelop and sent it off. And began to wait the 8-12 decades it takes for them to process it and send the toy to me. By the time it got within a few weeks of the predicted time period, I'd start wondering every day before the mail came, "Maybe today is the day. It PROBABLY isn't, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?" And I'd get all excited and then disappointed until the day it finally arrived.

Which brings me back to the present. I've been checking my email even more obsessively than usual because every time it crosses my mind I think "Maybe they sent the email today/this morning (/in the last five minutes). Yesterday after thinking that my day could only get better if I got an email, I actually didn't check my email until much later because I didn't want to expect my day to be THAT amazing. When I got home we had a ton of people in the house for the Platteville Safe Spring Break Party Challenge, so it wasn't until 10:30ish that I looked carefully enough at my email to realize that I had an important email.

The electrical engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne accepted me in to their program and offered me a "half-time" teaching assistantship (which means I get free tuition and money to live on in exchange for working as a ta). When I could breath again, my first impulse was to show it to my roommates (weaving around the 4 million people that still populated our house), call my parents and tell them, and show it to a couple other people that were at the party.

When I was thinking about whether or not to blog about it, my first thought was that this is kind of an impersonal way to tell some of my good friends, and I'd rather tell them personally. But then I decided that next to the people immediately around me, my closest friends read my blog, and so I decided to go for it.

I'm still not going to UIUC for certain, or even grad school for certain, but I now have a concrete option for the next couple years of my life. Before now all I had was potential, which doesn't put food on the table :).