The University of Illinois and hardening up

So I thought I'd try to continue with building some background for the blog with some specifics about the stuff in my life in it.

The University of Illinois

I work at the University of Illinois.  That means I'm an employee of the state of Illinois.  That's good and bad.  The retirement benefits are ok and we enjoy some protections I suppose we might not at a private university.  It also means that we are bearing an certain bureaucratic burden. This burden has been increasing in an attempt to answer what is seen to be a culture of corruption in the state government.  Imagine that.  It's understandable, but it doesn't make it any more fun for an honest man stuck dealing with rules set up to deal with crooks. 

I am an alumnus of the U of I myself.  I took a BS in Engineering Physics in 1994.  It was a great place to be an undergrad.  The town exists largely because the U is here and so it's pretty student-friendly.  There are lots of student-priced ethnic food joints and cool places to hang out that won't cost you an arm and a leg.  This also makes it a nice place to live as an ``adult.''  The educational experience was a notch above.  I was incredibly well prepared for grad school and I had a chance to do research with John Tucker and got my first paper out of it.  The best thing I got out of it was that I met, and in my senior year started dating, the woman who would be my wife. I've attached my favorite picture ever.  Not my favorite picture of my wife, my favorite picture ever.  It pretty much says it all and you can see why this trumps anything else I may have gotten out of the experience.

My feelings about the U of I are best explained in a story about someone who doesn't have much love for the school.  The wife of a friend of mine, an old roommate of mine actually, got all her degrees, including her PhD, at very expensive private schools.  I needle her about this occasionally and she's often looking for ammunition to fire back . It's all pretty good-natured.  Mostly.  Anyway, my buddy and I were talking about how, at something like five or six thousand bucks a year for tuition, it's a hell of a deal.  The physics department is consistently ranked in the top ten in the country, and his home department, ECE (now my home department) floats between 4th and 2nd nationally.  There's frequently a Nobel laureate to be found in the halls and the folks are just plain nice.   So she chimes in with, "That's the thing about you Illini.  You get a couple of you in the room and all you do is go on and on about what a great place it was, what a great deal it was, how much you liked it, how well it set you up for your careers.  My classmates and I don't do that." Well, yes.  Indeed.  We just looked at her and let it sink in for a while.  

Hardening up

So I quit my whining, taped up the pinky that now looks more like a thumb and played ball today like an Illini.  My shot is so bad to begin with that it really didn't matter.  I cleaned out my locker and am planning to take the shoes to Holland in hope of finding a game there and learning the Dutch for ``Foul, you clumsy american!''