Memories of Recruitment Weekend
It’s that time of year, when stomachs are aflutter and thoughts of long-term partnerships are in the air…
That’s right, it’s grad school recruiting season! Our recruitment weekend is near and I am playing my customary role as student host/recruit herder.
The memory of my own visit to Pitt/CMU three years ago mostly makes me wince. The weather was nice; this year’s recruits will be getting the aftermath of a trademark Pittsburgh winter storm—half snow-turned-slush, half freezing rain. The interviews themselves went fine. I felt terrible for most of the rest of the time. I had such a rough time of it (much of it my own doing), that sometimes I think it’s a marvel I ever decided to come here.
For starters, I very nearly missed my flight. I had mistakenly set my alarm for the PM instead of the AM, missed my taxi, and woke up with less than an hour before my flight was scheduled to depart. It was at that moment that I desperately wished I was on good terms with my car-owning then-roommate, but that’s a story for…never.
At any rate, in the course of making panicked phone calls to car-owning friends, I stumbled across a friend’s roommate who just happened to be leaving WAY early for an appointment, and who graciously agreed to drop everything and drive me to the airport. I made my flight with minutes to spare. And so my recruiting weekend started with a stress-induced and airplane-exacerbated headache and nausea.
The second problem was my choice of shoes. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT, wear 3-inch heels to a Pitt/CMU recruitment weekend, particularly if you are used to living in flats, like I am. You might be okay if you are only visiting one campus, but if you are doing a cross-campus visit like I did…don’t. I was about ready to cut my own feet off at the end of the first day. I wore sneakers the second day.
And finally, I got horribly sick at the end of the second day. I’m not sure if it was food poisoning from dinner or if I was just tired and carsick or some combination of the above, but I literally had to ask my student host to pull over at one point so I could throw up on the sidewalk. I couldn’t really eat without feeling nauseated for the rest of the weekend.
The rest of recruitment weekend is a blur. Every so often it’ll come up in conversation with friends in my cohort, “Remember on visiting weekend when we…?” And I never remember. I wasn’t encoding anything that was happening around me; I was just trying to get through the weekend without dying.
I crashed after I got back to Madison. The only significant thing I managed to accomplish in the days immediately after was to send the girl who drove me to the airport a thank you card and a giant box of gourmet cookies from Jamie’s on State Street.
Here’s to a better weekend for our incoming prospectives!
Chipanglish
CogKnition
Gustatory Circuit