Big Days
Even 5 years later, I can still remember the day that I won the Trustee Scholarship from Boston University. The thick, official BU envelope arrived on a Friday afternoon, and after reading it over a couple of times, I headed out to a party in Weston. As I drove into the dark expanse that is Plantation/Weston/The Everglades, I was swimming in thoughts about my future. I had just won four years of full tuition at a respectable research institution in Boston. This was my ticket out of Florida and into bigger and better things. New beginnings and opportunities awaited me.
In terms of the development of my life, that was a Big Day. Prior to that, I had a couple more. If we count 07/27/87 as Big Day #0, I’d say that Big Day #1 was the day that I started at Pine Crest. The fourteen years that I was a Panther had a lot to do with the person that I am today, and none of it would have happened without that first day of school. Along the way, I encountered Big Day #2: the day in fourth grade when I started playing the trombone. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into at the time, but the 9 years I spent playing music were full of cool places and people that I wouldn’t have met had I not decided to join Band on that fateful day.
Big Day #3 and its scholarship sent me to Boston, and it’s quite possible that this past Friday was Big Day #4. Another Friday afternoon, another piece of communication from a university. This time, it was Berkeley, letting me know that I’d been awarded an NSF VIGRE Fellowship in the UC Berkeley Statistics department. (For those of you who haven’t been thinking about graduate statistic programs daily for the last 6 months, Berkeley and Stanford are pretty much universally recognized as the strongest two statistics programs in the US.) Wow.
That said, I’m not committing myself to anything just yet. I still have yet to hear back from Duke, Harvard, and UNC Chapel Hill, which you’ll notice are all pretty prominently displayed on the US News rankings, and Wisconsin is a strong contender. And I’m definitely going to visit any program that I’m seriously considering joining. Still, if I had to point to something that summarized and validated the majority of my efforts over the past 5 years, I couldn’t do much better than that berkeley.edu email.
A closing thought:
