Corn Fields, Hamburgers and Universities

So, apparently 2009 has not been my year for faithful blogging.

I am currently sitting in the Eastern Iowa Airport awaiting my flight home attempting to ignore a troupe of rambunctious teenagers heading to Detroit (at least I hope they are going to Detroit because that flight is beginning to board now).

I visited the University of Iowa the past few days. I was impressed with the size of their department and the breadth of knowledge contained within their faculty's education and experience. I was also privy to the data collection process of a few subjects in their stuttering research lab. These included some standardized language and intelligence testing, gathering of kinematic data where the position of the upper lip, lower lip and jaw relative to various reference points around the face. This was similar to the data I analyzed for my thesis; however, there are striking differences as well. These are unimportant. I got to be nerdy: this is all that matters.

In addition to speaking with the researcher that I would be working with should I attend Iowa, I had the opportunity to speak with three PhD candidates and a student about to begin the PhD program in Educational Psychology. I was able to have a great number of my questions answered. And I had a fun time too! I drank so much coffee with the researcher and PhD students. I went bowling with some of the students and their spouses.

Iowa City is nothing to write home about. It reminds me of Kalamazoo: an art-sy large town surrounded by farms. There were things I enjoyed more about Iowa City versus Kalamazoo. The university abuts the downtown portion of the city, so downtown is easily accessible from the university. Speaking of downtown, it is rather small, but has a certain charm to it. There is a rather large pedestiran mall, quite a bit larger than the Kalamazoo Pedestrian Mall. The "Old State Capital" (Iowa City was the original capital of the State of Iowa), is clearly the center of townwith downtown radiating to the east and the west of the capitol building.

On the whole I enjoyed my visit. It reignited my excitment about continuing on in my education. I will be applying for the fall, but may possibly request a deferrment if the starts do not align.