Think I’ll Move To Boston…

Last night Jose and I went downtown to the Rockets game. Before the game, we were treated to a short Q&A session with the team’s general manager, Daryl Morey, courtesy of the Houston MIT Alumni Club. Morey is an alum as well, and apparently this is something they’ve been doing for three years now, although Jose just found out about it because he just joined the club a couple months ago. The session was short, but really interesting. The Rockets are the first team in the NBA to make a jump to the “moneyball” style of managing that has become so popular in baseball — where new ways of looking at statistics have begun to take a huge role in how teams make decisions. For a much more in-depth look, check out the New York Times article I linked to a month ago about the Rockets, and specifically about Shane Battier.

The session was fun, and the game was great (they got a good win over the Magic), but being surrounded by all those MIT grads got me thinking and reminiscing…

Eight years ago, I struggled for weeks with the decision of where to go for grad school. I applied to Michigan, MIT, Stanford and of course Georgia Tech because they were supposedly four of the top aerospace engineering schools, and I really had no clue what I wanted to do other than maybe be a professor. At the top of the short list were MIT and Stanford.

(The archives of this current blog don’t go back quite far enough to allow me to link to the entries I posted then. At the time, I had created a website that was counting down until graduation — I wrote an entry each day for 100 days. Though I do still have them on my computer at home, I’m not sure if I will ever make them publicly available again. Here’s one sentence that should suffice as an explanation: “It is not in my nature to avoid sharing each feeling I have when I have it.” As such, the daily entries are often cryptic and quite angst-ridden. I was a 22-year-old college student who was sleep-deprived and depressed, and freaking out about having to graduate and leave what I thought at the time was the best life I’d ever have. Yeah. Reading them now makes me cringe.)

Each school flew me out for a visit around the end of March/beginning of April. While in Ann Arbor, it snowed. While in Boston, it snowed. While in California, the sun shone brightly as the birds sang and the temperature hovered in the non-humid mid-70s.

Yeah. I went to Stanford.

(Ok, there were some other reasons too, but climate was not an insignificant consideration.)

But I often wonder how my life might have been different if I’d chosen MIT, especially after I started dating Jose. He was there from 1998-2004, and we would have been in grad school at the same time, in the same department, with me just one year ahead of him. It seems reasonable to think that we would have met at some point, so who knows — we might still be getting married. Weird, right?

In retrospect, I don’t regret choosing Stanford at all. I quickly realized once I was in grad school that I was not interested in doing significant research, which meant I was not interested pursuing a Ph.D. (which was my reason for going in the first place — because I wanted to teach, hence I “needed” a doctorate). And Stanford was the right place for me to get a Master’s degree without the now-undesired requirement of serious research. And I loved it there. Even though I was only there for a short nine months, I still think about those days often. They were great days.

But still, it’s fun to think “what if” sometimes.