I made it into the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I also picked up a minority fellowship, separate from any federal aid I get.

A few days ago, I also learned that I had officially made it into Mt. St. University. I was only competing with 11 other 'Learning and Behavior' applicants. I'd been told that L&B was less competitive, but now I almost wonder if I would have made it if I'd applied at 'Behavioral Neuroscience'. I can switch later for prestige and money purposes; just need approval from a panel of psych. faculty. Anyway, they have no idea on funding, but I'm turning in some fellowship forms either tomorrow or Friday (depending on how well I feel).

I'm genuinely happy that I made Madison. I didn't think Dr. Crisco would have made the decision until he interviewed me, but I have the feeling he'd made up his mind a long time ago.

That said, without being self-deprecating/getting down on myself, I'm surprised he took such an interest in me:

Dr. Crisco runs, with next to no argument, the largest and most famous monkey research institute in America, and one of the best university primate labs in the world. There are 500 monkies in that 3 story building at any given time--and the per day cost of each monkey is 10 bucks/USD. He has grant money, period. Graduate students of his have gone on to work at the Salk Institute, a private bio-research facility which is the wet dream of many, many scientists to get into, far more prestigious than even working in top government labs. Dr. Crisco can literally pick the absolute best in the field as far as graduate students go, because he is one of the best.

Now, I am a damn good overall candidate; in some ways I am an excellent candidate; that said, though, I am not an exceptional, outstanding world-class candidate. This is not the voice of arrogance or low self-esteem. I know my competition. My competition can get a near perfect score on the Graduate Record Exam; my competition gets a near perfect GPA, and in some cases better than a perfect GPA. The slot that I got in Dr. Crisco's lab is the kind reserved for those utterly stunning foreign students, the ones who speak bad English and put on Cornell and Yale as safety schools for their undergraduate college/university.

You can begin to see why I feel so odd about Dr. Crisco's interest, then. I'm ecstatic (as much as I can be being sick). Yet I gotta wonder: why did he pick me?

Maybe I'll find out some day.

In any case, for the first time since I decided to do higher education, I have a choice about where I can go to school. So far as college goes, I first went to the University of Puget Sound because they were the only ones who didn't keep losing my paperwork. Same deal with Oberlin: Oberlin was my stretch/ideal school, and somehow they were the only ones that got all my information in and didn't lose it.

----

If someone had told me back in High School that I'd be going to graduate school, I'd be surprised. If they told me I'd be doing it in a science, I'd have laughed--and laughed hard. I hated most of the sciences in High School.

Well, guess something changed.

It's a good career track for now. We'll see how it develops.

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