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Syracuse recap
I'd planned on Tuesday to get up at 4 o' clock in the morning so I could ensure I was on my way by five. I was having a really hard time getting to sleep though. I've tended toward staying up 'till one or two, and I was trying to lie down around ten. Since I'd been planning in a lot of extra time already, I allowed myself to change my alarm for 5 during one of my spans of lying abed relaxing and letting my brain wander. I even convinced myself that relaxing and semi-consciously letting my mind go all sorts of strange places might be almost as good as sleep. I'm not sure how true that was, but when five came around I was feeling fairly conscious after six or so hours of sleep amidst spans of wakeful dozing.
Most of my stuff was packed up already. I had a turkey sandwich, and allowed myself a can of Danae's Pepsi Max. That was quite possibly my only caffeine intake all year, so it helped wake me up and get me feeling energetic as I got the GPS set up in the car and put my camera gear and itinerary next to me on the passenger seat. Soon enough, I was on the road, speeding eastward on the Queen Elizabeth Way toward Niagara Falls.
Sunrise over the Niagara Peninsula was pretty; soft and misty over hills and bridges. Customs went smoothly, if slowly, and I stopped for gas and water just into New York state. The rest stop had a penny squishing machine, but I realized that with my late start plus delays at the border, I didn't really have time to track down change to make pennies for my dad (he's a collector). Maybe I'll pass through again some time.
As the drive along the New York Thruway went on, I was getting a little nervous about time in fact. My margin seemed awfully small. By the time I got to Syracuse University, it was about ten minutes to ten o' clock, the time of my appointment. Fortunately I found parking quickly at a lot that didn't seem to be signed at all, and I went in search of the Eggers building.
The Syracuse campus is on a hill. A large, rather steep hill. Which I had to climb on my way up to the building. But I made it to the top, found the right building, and located the professor's office. I introduced myself and we talked for a while. It turned out I needn't have been worried about time; either there was a miscommunication or (more likely) I'd remembered the number wrong, but our meeting was at eleven. I offered to come back in an hour, but he said now was just fine too.
The conversation was great. Syracuse's program seems really promising. It's part of a school of public policy, and has a focus on community engagement. I'd like to think that, if I become a geographer, I might have some impact on matters of public policy via analysis of urban issues. Syracuse seems like a good place for that kind of goal. The program (as is the field of human geography in general) is very interdisciplinary. There is a core set of classes to take, but everything else is worked out with your advisor. Geography students take classes in departments from philosophy to architecture to anthropology to political science. The class size is limited by available funding, but all students are fully funded. Evaluation of applicants is based more on how good a fit the applicant's goals and plans are for the program than other factors. This all sounds quite like what I'm looking for, and I'm going to follow up by looking in more depth at the work being done by geography program and the Maxwell School of Public Policy to see how I'd fit in.
The first professor suggested I talk to two other professors who were there on campus that day and pointed me at their offices. The first was in the same building, so I knocked on her door. If anything, the talk I had with her was even more interesting. We seem to share a number of interests. I talked about my travels through towns that had dried up as transportation changed, and she told me that she did a thesis on that very thing, looking at redistribution of populations vis-a-vis transportation technologies! We compared her knowledge of and work in Lincoln, Nebraska with my knowledge of Kenosha, and talked more generally about post-industrial cities and the ways they've changed. We talked about the movement of people coming back to city centers lately, and the conflicting positive forces of city revitalization and negative forces of displacement through gentrification and the need to find a way to balance these things. It was a really enjoyable conversation that left me thinking that I really might fit in.
Both professors I talked with thought that my getting a GIS certificate would be a really good idea as part of preparation for this kind of grad program, and that it might set me apart as a candidate, so I feel good about making that choice. One of the things they use GIS regularly for is as part of a community engagement initiative where they work with local community activism groups. They determine what kind of assistance the group needs in terms of spatial investigation and analysis and provide that kind of assistance in order to promote positive community change. As someone who feels its important to apply my skills in creating positive change rather than just play with data for data's sake from a detached perspective, I like that a lot. I think I'll email back and ask about recent community projects.
So I moved on to the third professor, but it turned out she didn't have time to talk. We exchanged contact info, and I walked back to my car. I looked briefly around the campus, but I didn't want to linger too long because I wasn't sure if my car was somewhere it was supposed to be. I'd chanced it due to what I thought was a time crunch, and I really didn't want a ticket if I could avoid it. When I got back down the hill, I found a piece of paper under my window advising parking pass holders that the lot would be closed in the future and where to go instead, but no ticket. Yay! I suspect that, since it was a major student visit weekend, enforcement was probably kind of lax.
So I'll write about the rest of my trip in another entry, but I'll let that stand by itself. I'm even going to tag this (I never use tags on LJ, though maybe I ought to start), because it might be helpful for me to be able to easily come back and find what I wrote about Syracuse later on. Everything went really well, and I'm still excited thinking about it!
Most of my stuff was packed up already. I had a turkey sandwich, and allowed myself a can of Danae's Pepsi Max. That was quite possibly my only caffeine intake all year, so it helped wake me up and get me feeling energetic as I got the GPS set up in the car and put my camera gear and itinerary next to me on the passenger seat. Soon enough, I was on the road, speeding eastward on the Queen Elizabeth Way toward Niagara Falls.
Sunrise over the Niagara Peninsula was pretty; soft and misty over hills and bridges. Customs went smoothly, if slowly, and I stopped for gas and water just into New York state. The rest stop had a penny squishing machine, but I realized that with my late start plus delays at the border, I didn't really have time to track down change to make pennies for my dad (he's a collector). Maybe I'll pass through again some time.
As the drive along the New York Thruway went on, I was getting a little nervous about time in fact. My margin seemed awfully small. By the time I got to Syracuse University, it was about ten minutes to ten o' clock, the time of my appointment. Fortunately I found parking quickly at a lot that didn't seem to be signed at all, and I went in search of the Eggers building.
The Syracuse campus is on a hill. A large, rather steep hill. Which I had to climb on my way up to the building. But I made it to the top, found the right building, and located the professor's office. I introduced myself and we talked for a while. It turned out I needn't have been worried about time; either there was a miscommunication or (more likely) I'd remembered the number wrong, but our meeting was at eleven. I offered to come back in an hour, but he said now was just fine too.
The conversation was great. Syracuse's program seems really promising. It's part of a school of public policy, and has a focus on community engagement. I'd like to think that, if I become a geographer, I might have some impact on matters of public policy via analysis of urban issues. Syracuse seems like a good place for that kind of goal. The program (as is the field of human geography in general) is very interdisciplinary. There is a core set of classes to take, but everything else is worked out with your advisor. Geography students take classes in departments from philosophy to architecture to anthropology to political science. The class size is limited by available funding, but all students are fully funded. Evaluation of applicants is based more on how good a fit the applicant's goals and plans are for the program than other factors. This all sounds quite like what I'm looking for, and I'm going to follow up by looking in more depth at the work being done by geography program and the Maxwell School of Public Policy to see how I'd fit in.
The first professor suggested I talk to two other professors who were there on campus that day and pointed me at their offices. The first was in the same building, so I knocked on her door. If anything, the talk I had with her was even more interesting. We seem to share a number of interests. I talked about my travels through towns that had dried up as transportation changed, and she told me that she did a thesis on that very thing, looking at redistribution of populations vis-a-vis transportation technologies! We compared her knowledge of and work in Lincoln, Nebraska with my knowledge of Kenosha, and talked more generally about post-industrial cities and the ways they've changed. We talked about the movement of people coming back to city centers lately, and the conflicting positive forces of city revitalization and negative forces of displacement through gentrification and the need to find a way to balance these things. It was a really enjoyable conversation that left me thinking that I really might fit in.
Both professors I talked with thought that my getting a GIS certificate would be a really good idea as part of preparation for this kind of grad program, and that it might set me apart as a candidate, so I feel good about making that choice. One of the things they use GIS regularly for is as part of a community engagement initiative where they work with local community activism groups. They determine what kind of assistance the group needs in terms of spatial investigation and analysis and provide that kind of assistance in order to promote positive community change. As someone who feels its important to apply my skills in creating positive change rather than just play with data for data's sake from a detached perspective, I like that a lot. I think I'll email back and ask about recent community projects.
So I moved on to the third professor, but it turned out she didn't have time to talk. We exchanged contact info, and I walked back to my car. I looked briefly around the campus, but I didn't want to linger too long because I wasn't sure if my car was somewhere it was supposed to be. I'd chanced it due to what I thought was a time crunch, and I really didn't want a ticket if I could avoid it. When I got back down the hill, I found a piece of paper under my window advising parking pass holders that the lot would be closed in the future and where to go instead, but no ticket. Yay! I suspect that, since it was a major student visit weekend, enforcement was probably kind of lax.
So I'll write about the rest of my trip in another entry, but I'll let that stand by itself. I'm even going to tag this (I never use tags on LJ, though maybe I ought to start), because it might be helpful for me to be able to easily come back and find what I wrote about Syracuse later on. Everything went really well, and I'm still excited thinking about it!