CELEBRITY #1:
Today, I got up at 7:30 AM to go have breakfast with Melanie Sanford. Melanie Sanford is basically a chemistry rock star. She graduated from Yale in 1996, got her PhD at Caltech, and now works at the University of Michigan working, among other things, to functionalize C-H bonds. She's the kind of person professors compare you to when writing your letters of recommendation. "On a scale from 1 to Melanie Sanford..." Oh yeah, and did I mention she won a McArthur Genius Award in 2011? That makes her pretty much, what's the word, a GENIUS.
I'm definitely not a morning person, but the brisk 16 degree gusts definitely helped wake me up as I walked over to breakfast. (Earmuffs, please!) However, even as my fingers were not quite warmed up from my jaunt over, my brain woke up straight away when Melanie started talking. She was so approachable and full of energy and enthusiasm and told story upon story of her undergrad life, marveling at how things don't change as much as people say they do. So many of her experiences mirrored ours and we gossiped about professors and courses and the fact that she was on the gymnastics team while here. She was definitely more inspiring than I was prepared for at 8 AM, and I was buzzed from meeting her even two hours later (after which I promptly took a much needed nap).
~~
CELEBRITY #2:
JE had a Master's Tea (where our Master invites a cool person to come and drink tea, or in my case, cider, with us and chat about life) featuring Andy Sandberg, JE '06, a producer in New York best known for his work on the revival of Broadway classic, Hair. I had gone to see Hair with Chris last winter (January 2011) and was pretty blown away by the colors and all the hair and all the...well... only slightly veiled nakedness. I fell in love with Claude a little bit and my favorite song was by far "Manchester, England" (not an obvious choice, I know, but I loved it). Also, going up on stage and dancing with the cast was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. So of course, I had to go to the Andy Sandberg Master's Tea.
Now I'll be honest: I think the work Andy's done is amazing and it takes a lot of cojones to go into the theater business right out of college (and awesomeness to get your own wikipedia page), but the Master's Tea fell flat a little bit for me because the girl in front of me had kind of a big head and half of her head was blocking half of Andy's head so my eyes adjusted and everything got weirdly spaced. It's like when you hold a toilet paper roll next to your open hand and look through the toilet paper roll with one eye while keeping the other eye open and it looks like your hand has a hole in it. Well, it looked like that girl's head had a hole in it so I could see Andy, but I couldn't concentrate terribly well. Also, his theater stories had an inside joke quality to them that I wasn't terribly fond of. I think it might have gone better had Melanie not been so awesome this morning.
~~
CELEBRITYS #3-?
I know I should always take advantage of opportunities as they come and I'm trying harder to, I really am! So today, when the call went out for the Fellow's Dinner, I said, oh why not? A bunch of graduate students and some of my classmates and I? Sounds like fun. There will be a better dinner than in the dining hall, so I signed up. And...they weren't graduate fellows. They were Fellow fellows, like, people who had been fellows for about 40 years fellows. And they were very animated, wonderful people with whom I had great conversations and shared pretty good wine. I met a chemist and his wife, a musician and her husband, a professor of Islamic culture, and other wonderful human beings. Definitely going to be looking into more Fellows Dinners in the future.
~~
I think the theme of this blog post is to go out and do things. Meet people, even if it's inconvenient or cuts into your you-time. More often than not, it'll be so worth it.
Today, I got up at 7:30 AM to go have breakfast with Melanie Sanford. Melanie Sanford is basically a chemistry rock star. She graduated from Yale in 1996, got her PhD at Caltech, and now works at the University of Michigan working, among other things, to functionalize C-H bonds. She's the kind of person professors compare you to when writing your letters of recommendation. "On a scale from 1 to Melanie Sanford..." Oh yeah, and did I mention she won a McArthur Genius Award in 2011? That makes her pretty much, what's the word, a GENIUS.
I'm definitely not a morning person, but the brisk 16 degree gusts definitely helped wake me up as I walked over to breakfast. (Earmuffs, please!) However, even as my fingers were not quite warmed up from my jaunt over, my brain woke up straight away when Melanie started talking. She was so approachable and full of energy and enthusiasm and told story upon story of her undergrad life, marveling at how things don't change as much as people say they do. So many of her experiences mirrored ours and we gossiped about professors and courses and the fact that she was on the gymnastics team while here. She was definitely more inspiring than I was prepared for at 8 AM, and I was buzzed from meeting her even two hours later (after which I promptly took a much needed nap).
~~
CELEBRITY #2:
JE had a Master's Tea (where our Master invites a cool person to come and drink tea, or in my case, cider, with us and chat about life) featuring Andy Sandberg, JE '06, a producer in New York best known for his work on the revival of Broadway classic, Hair. I had gone to see Hair with Chris last winter (January 2011) and was pretty blown away by the colors and all the hair and all the...well... only slightly veiled nakedness. I fell in love with Claude a little bit and my favorite song was by far "Manchester, England" (not an obvious choice, I know, but I loved it). Also, going up on stage and dancing with the cast was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. So of course, I had to go to the Andy Sandberg Master's Tea.
Now I'll be honest: I think the work Andy's done is amazing and it takes a lot of cojones to go into the theater business right out of college (and awesomeness to get your own wikipedia page), but the Master's Tea fell flat a little bit for me because the girl in front of me had kind of a big head and half of her head was blocking half of Andy's head so my eyes adjusted and everything got weirdly spaced. It's like when you hold a toilet paper roll next to your open hand and look through the toilet paper roll with one eye while keeping the other eye open and it looks like your hand has a hole in it. Well, it looked like that girl's head had a hole in it so I could see Andy, but I couldn't concentrate terribly well. Also, his theater stories had an inside joke quality to them that I wasn't terribly fond of. I think it might have gone better had Melanie not been so awesome this morning.
~~
CELEBRITYS #3-?
I know I should always take advantage of opportunities as they come and I'm trying harder to, I really am! So today, when the call went out for the Fellow's Dinner, I said, oh why not? A bunch of graduate students and some of my classmates and I? Sounds like fun. There will be a better dinner than in the dining hall, so I signed up. And...they weren't graduate fellows. They were Fellow fellows, like, people who had been fellows for about 40 years fellows. And they were very animated, wonderful people with whom I had great conversations and shared pretty good wine. I met a chemist and his wife, a musician and her husband, a professor of Islamic culture, and other wonderful human beings. Definitely going to be looking into more Fellows Dinners in the future.
~~
I think the theme of this blog post is to go out and do things. Meet people, even if it's inconvenient or cuts into your you-time. More often than not, it'll be so worth it.
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