Whirlwind Changes

Bill graduates with his undergrad in Civil Engineering in December.  We've been thinking about what he wants to do after that for probably a year or longer.  He has always wanted to eventually get a PhD, so the closer we've gotten to this point we've been thinking about this option.  He's done a lot of work looking for schools he might like to attend, deciding on his research interests, and more recently applying to various programs.  My brother Josh became an invaluable resource to us when he gave Bill advice on contacting professors at the schools he applied to. Josh is almost done with his PhD, so he knows how these things work, and his advice really helped us out.

Bill applied to three PhD programs, plus BYU's masters of Structural Engineering program as a backup.  He contacted professors at all those schools.  The first one, Colorado State, said they were very interested in him, but they didn't have any funding.  That was really frustrating and was the catalyst for applying to BYU's program in case the other programs said similar things.  Iowa State never even deigned to reply to Bill.  That was lame.  So Clemson was the last option, and although Bill was hesitant to pay another application fee only to hear no again, about a week before the application deadline he sent an email to the professor there he was interested in working with.  He got a quick reply saying the professor was super interested in Bill and he would give him a call.  This was right about the time I was about to have Genevieve, so it was a bit crazy to get such a quick reply right then.   Genevieve came on the 28th and he ended up talking to the professor on the 30th, just in time to finish his application and turn it in on the due date, the 1st of September.  After that conversation, in his words, Bill felt like this was the awesomest and scariest thing to ever happen to him all at the same time. :)  See, the professor not only showed interest in Bill, but he wanted Bill to come out, and he pretty much talked like it was a done deal for us to go there.  Remember, this is all probably going to happen in 4 months.  We had started to think before this that maybe we would stay in Utah for a while longer, so this felt crazy.

Well Bill went out to Clemson this weekend for a few days.  That's right, two weeks after he talked to Dr. Schiff he was in South Carolina mostly on their dime.  This was looking serious.  He loved it.  They seem to want him.  We are still working on the funding aspect and whether that will come through, but if that works out then we are going to be headed to South Carolina in about three months.  Holy cow!  I'm really excited about it.  The program is short.  Dr. Schiff wants him in and out in 3.5 years.  We'll see if he makes that short time period, but even still, that's just not much time from bachelor's to PhD.  And if it all works out, then we'll be totally done with school and with a PhD in what feels like no time at all.  That would be amazing!  We still have lots to do, but I have high hopes for how this will all turn out.  We will miss Utah and our family and friends here so much, but this opportunity is going to be incredible.

And who wouldn't want to go to a place that looks like this: