Recently in Blast from the Past Category

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. :)

NASA is transitioning to all-electronic personnel files for employees. As a result, I got a sealed envelope in my office mail today that contains all of the paperwork they had on file for me that they determined did not need to be transferred to my electronic record -- things like transcripts, training records and offer letters. It's pretty cool to look at because it contains a lot of paperwork from my days as a co-op. It's got random things like a copy of my letter of admission to the graduate program at Stanford, summaries that I had to write each semester to cover what I worked on as a co-op, and a copy of my transcript at the end of freshman year. (Straight A's, thank you very much. I did not maintain straight A's after my freshman year, but oh well.)

The best item by far is the very first letter I got from JSC, offering me a job as a co-op student. It was June 1997 and I had just finished my freshman year at Georgia Tech.

Dear Sarah:

Congratulations! We want you to join us as a Cooperative Education Student at the Johnson Space Center. You will be hired as a GS-3 with an annual salary of $17,332 on August 18, 1997...

I distinctly remember getting that letter, and $17,332 seemed like a LOT of money. How times change...

My sister wrote a great blog entry today about some of her childhood memories from growing up in Charlotte, and growing up in our neighborhood in particular. I don't remember all of the same things that she does, probably because a few are specific to her life and I'm five years older. But I do remember a lot.

Our elementary school mascot was the trolley (yes, the inanimate object), and apparently that's now been changed! Bummer. She mentions Wad's, which was an old-school lunch counter and drugstore place up the street that we'd walk to for gum and candy. She mentions our old neighbors, the Utseys. I remember Mr. Utsey watching the Tour de France in the late 80s when Greg LeMond was the American upstart, not Lance Armstrong. And he'd play catch with us in the front yard, throwing the baseball so high in the air and letting us run around trying to get under it and catch it with his huge catcher's mitt. And I remember the winter Katie mentions where it iced hard enough that we could sled from the top of a huge hill all the way down to the base of our street. The only trick was that it involved a 90 degree turn. I didn't make the turn, and hit the curb. The sled stayed behind while I went skidding off into the park.

The park itself is a constant presence in all of my childhood memories. We lived next to a large city park (in fact, we could walk through our backyard to reach the tennis courts), which meant that we always had somewhere to go play. I remember rollerblading on the tennis courts, and riding my bike through the park. There used to be a large dam on the creek that you could reach by skirting along a thin strip of concrete and holding onto a chain link fence -- there was a 20-30 drop below. When you came back from the dam, you were dumped into a little ditch filled with rocks and concrete. One time as I jumped back into the ditch, I fell and hit my head on the rocks. I got to ride my bike all the way home with one hand while holding the other to my head to stop the bleeding.

The park was also home to a yearly arts festival where we'd paint rocks and eat elephant ears and watch the cloggers all week. The park had a bandshell on a little island in the middle of the lake that occasionally we could get to when someone left the gate unlocked. Way back when, the park had a rocket slide and an airplane and a train. Not a play airplane or play train -- no, an actual airplane and actual train engine. And you could climb all over them! Climb on the wings of the airplane, and into the inner workings of the train engine. The airplane is long gone, and the train is now behind a tall fence. "Too dangerous" in this day and age.

My parents still live in the same house I grew up in; they've been there next to the park for 30 years. The fact that I can still go home -- truly home, to the house where I grew up -- is one of the things I love most. I know that someday my parents will sell the house, and since only one of the four children in my family still lives in Charlotte, the house will almost certainly pass on to someone else. Possibly someone who will simply tear it down and build another monster house too big for the lot and too close to the street and just too something. When that day comes, it's nice to know that we all have such great memories of growing up there.

11:33 pm, April 6, 1997

I suppose I do look like a tomboy in many ways. I wear tennis shoes instead of clogs, jeans instead of dark brown dress pants, and avoid dressing up at most costs. I can see how an outsider looking at me could come to the conclusion that I am athletic. But I don’t feel like an athlete. When Marti asked what sports I played, I could only reply that I used to play soccer, and that I watch a lot of sports on TV. I cannot think of any answer that would be more pathetic. I want to be able to put together a better answer to the question “are you athletic?” I don’t like being pathetic.

(I think a couple commenters were confused. Note the date at the top -- I wrote this in 1997 while a sophomore at Georgia Tech, and found it while digging through my hard drive last night. I was definitely not athletic then. Ten years later, I know that I am athletic, and I like that. I don't feel pathetic anymore.)