Kristen Smirnov

Decision Made

And I am off to…

That’s right! Come late this summer I’ll be heading to the Great White North. (Though it won’t be white quite yet. After all, the people there only seem to talk about seven months of winter.) I’ve accepted a PhD program position offer at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It seems like a really good match in terms of interest and support for consumer behavior research, as well as being a very supportive program for the students themselves.

Also, Edmonton itself seems like it will be a pleasant place to live for four years. If I wind up in the right area I can ride a train in to campus, completely avoiding the roads during the snowy seasons save for the quick jaunt to the park-and-ride. There’s plenty to do (metro area of a million people, after all) but it’s spread out enough that when I need peace and quiet to focus, I’ll have it. And the summers? Average high of 70, which is… something in Celsius. I’ll really need to learn that. (Yes, the winter temperatures are… something much lower in Celsius. It’s a lot easier to warm up in cold winters than it is to cool down in hot summers.)

Finally, even though I had no logical reason to do so, I had always sort of associated Alberta’s landscape with Saskatchewan’s. You know: wheat fields, and… well, wheat fields. Never mind that I knew that the Rockies fell neatly along the border between Alberta and British Columbia, or that I had been to Alberta (many years earlier).

And then I did some Flickr surfing and reminded myself. Oh, right. Within driving distance of my school is this.

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And it begins!

I am officially an accepted PhD candidate! I’ve heard from multiple places at this point, and some of it is a little more fuzzy than others, but I will most certainly not be out on the street come next fall, left alone and unwanted.

…With a MBA, okay, the whole poor me picture doesn’t quite hold up.

But still! Terribly exciting.

Upcoming travel, some to visit schools and interview, some just to see the area and campus:

March 23 - 26: Syracuse, Ithaca
March 28 - 29: Edmonton
April 6-7: Eugene

I am going to be so very tired come April 7th.

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Back from the Wasatch Front

The area around the UofU was, as I had heard, absolutely gorgeous. Mind, I was viewing it with bare trees and in the middle of an uncharacteristic and awful inversion that made the 10,000-foot peaks framing the campus barely visible. The Sugarhouse area (which is more affordable than the Avenues) had its own charm that was a little less immediately obvious, but no less present.

Unfortunately, the campus itself didn’t quite have the same charm as the areas around it. I now realize why the university website generally shows long shots that feature the campus’ position against the mountains, not the specific beauty of the school itself. I’m used to a state university setting, mind, but BSU has a very traditional academia feeling: heavily pedestrian, parking lots kept to the outside edges, no roads running through the campus proper. UofU is very much banded by roads and parking lots, which makes it feel less like “going to a university” and more like “going to a random building and talking about business.”

Now, granted: the program is very good, and I would happily attend. And the city itself is great.

But would it have killed the original architects to scratch in a few more spaces for lawns?

In other news, the more I read, the more impractical the iPhone seems for me and the more I want it.

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Lay of the land

I’m popping down to Salt Lake City this weekend to check out the housing situation around the university. I know Salt Lake is definitely near the top of my list for aesthestics — really — and the cultural scene — really — and just about everything else you would expect from a darned cool place to live.

Really! Shut up. Look at this if you need further confirmation.

(Okay, yes, it lacks good nightclubs. But I don’t go clubbing, but do enjoy art shows and film festivals and the like. And, well, if you like film festivals…)

Should be a fun little jaunt. A fun little cold jaunt.

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Non-Netflixed Movies, 2006 Version

I thought I’d sit and count up all the movies I caught this past year in a real theatre. The total is rather pathetic.

- X-3: The Last Stand
- Superman Returns
- She’s the Man (seen when nothing else was at a convenient time and we were already wandering the blocks around the theatre; I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this admittedly stupid movie)
- Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (I did not get that title from memory)
- Dreamgirls

…Sadly, I’m fairly sure that’s the entire list.

In case you were wondering, grad school is not terribly conducive to having a life.

ETA: Strike that! I also caught American Dreamz. Helpful hint: if you’re a fan of American Idol, watch it. And then don’t ever watch it again, for it stands up to repeated use slightly less impressively than a kleenex.

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Applications In So Far

I know, I’ve been focusing on this for forever, it seems. But the gears are in motion! As of today’s round in my FedEx trips, the schools that have been applied to:

- Cornell
- Madison
- Oregon
- Utah
- Toronto

Not much of an update, I know, but hey. For these five, nothing left to do but wait on hearing back.

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One semester to go! …Before I go to a new school.

Phew! This was one very packed semester. I was managing four classes and an independent study (which I’m about to begin running a survey for), studying for GMAT improvement, and doing school research to figure out which universities would be the best fits.

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Narrowing-Down Time!

Next year — assuming I get accepted somewhere — I’ll be starting a marketing Ph.D. That’s lead to an extremely busy semester this fall as I:

• Study to take the GMAT again
• Go through the program-identification-and-winnowing process
• Work on having three papers in the publishing pipeline so I can look more impressive upon application

At least the worst test of the semester, classwise, is happening in a couple of weeks. (I’ve had this professor before and I describe the grading on her tests thusly: "A 100% is the sum total of all human knowledge on the subject. It goes down from there.") And then, despite having four classes this semester, it really won’t be that bad.

Speaking of programs, these are the ones I pretty much have decided upon. I want to get it down to ten, simply because the applications are so damnably expensive. Luckily, there’s something that instantly wiped out half the programs in the U.S. for my consideration: a Russian/German background with an Alaskan childhood. So, no, professors. No matter how many times you tell me that Austin seems like a perfect match for my personality, I am not heading that far south the heat and humidity no no no no no no no no no no no.

• University of Edmonton
• Boston University
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Cornell
• Harvard
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• University of Oregon
• Syracuse University
• University of Toronto
• University of Utah
• Washington State University

(Chapel Hill might seem like an outlier. It kind of is, and that might be one of the ones to go. But I’ve visited Duke and UNCCH before, really liked the area in the spring, and North Carolina isn’t SO far south.)

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“My Own Private Idaho” is so overused

Catch-up time! I finished my operations class and am 4/5 done with a finance class that is just as time-consuming and packed just as full of content. It’s funny to think I’ll have more free time with four classes going instead of just one, but that’s almost certainly how it will work out.

As this class winds down, my mom and I took a short weekend getaway. And I took pictures. (Click on the smaller images to see them blown up.)

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Done!

For the past five weeks I’ve been taking a 3 credit class in Operations Management. It’s one of the core requirements for the MBA, and taking it during the summer helps me keep my approaching fall and spring semesters down to 11 and 10 credits, respectively. But it was 10 classes in 5 weeks, 5:30-9:55 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and that is a lot of class in that time. Even more when, in those nine classes (as the last one was the final exam), you work through eight group case studies. Phew! The professor was great, and the content itself was interesting, but I pretty much stopped thinking about anything but Operations Management for five weeks solid.

And on Monday, I start another five week semester. Finance, this time.

I’m only a little scared.

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