Category Archives: Home & Family

My daughter Jessi and I wandered around the Carnegie Mellon campus
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania yesterday between official tours and
interviews. We were invited to join the Music department’s weekly noon
Convocation in the Kresge Recital Hall and were lucky enough to be
there the day famed jazz horn player Warren Vache played.

The hall was very full in the back 2/3. The front few rows were empty during
the opening set until Mr. Vache pointed out that he and the other
two players had bathed and had their shots and would someone please come
sit nearer. He told a few funny stories and answered some questions
but mostly expressed himself delightfully through his music.

CMU is a very impressive place. The integration of art, music, and
computer science is particularly attractive to we from the Silicon Valley.
The recital halls are fully linked into professional recording studios and
there is also a professional sound mixing studio which is part of the art
department on the top floor. The architecture school is in the same
building as music and art. The Fine Arts Building floor at entry level
is inlaid with marble diagrams of famous buildings – Athens’ Parthenon,
St. Peter’s of Rome, and Notre Dame in Paris among them.

Jessi had fun staying over in the CMU dorms with her friends and visited with
her cousin Joel who is attending U Pitt next door. She found CMU to be
very much a 24×7 campus and was impressed by the size of the killer
chocolate cookies with ice cream on top.

We were lucky enough to be able to sit in on a delightful music lesson by
Douglas Ahlstedt (an associate professor of voice at CMU with a specialty
in vocal health). CMU’s music
department only takes 35 to 40 students a year, only 15 of them in voice.
So, Jessi’s application may not be accepted (but what an amazing place to
be trained if she did get in). Even I with no music training could tell
that the facilities and teachers are world class. The staff were very helpful
and answered questions both in email in advance and while we were there.
Jessi points out that artists who email you back are a rare breed.

My daughter has narrowed down the list of colleges to which she is
applying to ten. All of the applications are due at the end of this
year. She and I flew to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania today to visit three
of the colleges on her list: Carnegie Mellon, Oberlin, and Kenyon. We
will tour CMU tomorrow, then drive to Ohio to visit the other two. Jessi
already visited over a dozen colleges on an earlier tour with her school.
All of those were located between New Jersey and Boston (Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, MIT, etc.).

Last week, her list still included about 15 schools. We finally used a Pugh
Matrix to prioritize the final choices and reduce the list to 10. Jessi’s
primary categories of interest were Music (Vocal Performance, not Theory),
Computer Science, International Relations, and English. We added a General category to cover everything else (including whether they had a wrestling
team which welcomes women wrestlers). Every potential school was rated
in each category with High (5 points), Medium (3 points), or Low (1 point).
The scores ranged from a perfect 25 (Princeton) to five which rated a 15.
Once the list was reduced, it easily sorted into the 3 categories required
by Jessi’s college counsellor: likely, possible, and very difficult.

We walked up Forbes Avenue through U Pitt (the University of Pittsburgh)
to CMU tonight. We visited a book shop and had an Indian dinner. I am
staying at a hotel near campus while Jessi spends the night in the
dorm room of a friend who started at CMU this year. Tomorrow, we go on
several campus tours, visit some classes, plus Jessi has an interview with
the CMU Admissions Department.

My husband and I are having a special dinner Thursday night. Jessi called
from school at lunch break today to say that she had not talked with us
about anything but college, grades, and SATs for weeks and could we please
have a meal at which those topics are banned?

She has a point. For the next 12 weeks, every kid in the USA who is applying
to go to college in September 2007 will be preparing and sending in their
applications to their preferred schools. Even those who have already sent in
their Early Admittance or
Early Decision requests are probably working on the applications for their
backup choices. (It is a little disturbing that I now know the difference
between Early Admittance and Early Decision.) After years of discussion
and preparation, it is strange to be this deep in the process of deciding
where to send our beloved daughter and eldest child off to college.

Jessi’s college advisor at Harker
recommended that she and we read The Gatekeepers by Jacques
Steinberg. This is the story of the Class of 2004 admissions process for
Wesleyan, a university in Connecticut.
I found the book of particular interest because the SEED Engineering mentoring
program I manage for Sun has many similar application and admission processes.
The volume of college applicants far exceeds anything SEED gets,
thank goodness; however, we do hold the same discussions of how to value one
set of accomplishments over another. In Wesleyan’s case, the choices often seemed
to be high SAT test scores or grades
vs. demonstrated leadership vs. writing or dance or music talent vs. cultural origin.
In SEED discussions, it is often work history vs. demonstrated creative
ability vs. patents or publications vs. high recommendations vs. demonstrated
leadership or technical excellence. Few candidates excel in all areas and, just
like the admissions officers in the book, I always wish I could accept more than I
have spaces for.

It is hard to read The Gatekeepers just now because I keep thinking
over my own daughter’s academic, athletic, musical, and personal profile
and wondering what a college admissions officer will make of her. I think
Jessi is wise to call an occassional time out from college discussions
to reconnect as a family who loves each other.

I admit I can’t cook. While I have a green thumb for gardening, it is
definitely a black thumb when it comes to cooking, particularly baking.
I am blessed in having a husband who cooks like an angel who has taught
our kids to cook. Our daughter bakes to relax. When Jessi has a week of
exams, she brings muffins and cookies and cakes to each test (a habit
much encouraged by her classmates, you can be sure).
However, I have a strange fascination for
Nordicware.

“Nordic Ware is a family-owned, American manufacturer of kitchenware products
founded in 1946. … Nordic Ware is best known for its Bundt® Pan. Today,
there are nearly 60 million Bundt® pans in kitchens across America.”

I have proven myself unable even to cook a bundt cake (famously the easiest
cake to make) but I have developed a collection of the fancy cake pans for
use by my family. I was originally seduced by the Cathedral pan (modeled
after Notre Dame Cathedral, my favorite), and went on to buy the heart, rose,
sand castle, and bouquet muffin pan. I find it amusing to arrive at a
meeting or pot luck party with a cathedral shaped cake as my contribution.

The Nordicware Christmas catalogue just arrived. They are now offering
a stadium-shaped cake pan but the carousel pan looks more fun. What confuses
me is the catalogue section on “Natural Commercial Bakeware”. What is
natural about bakeware? Wikipedia lists many meanings of “natural”, but
bakeware?

Sputnik and I have almost the same birthday. The space age dawned
the week after I was born. My mother says she showed my older
brother and me Sputnik when it was just a tiny speck of light in
the evening sky above San Francisco. I also share my birth year with
Dr. Seuss’s Grinch and the Cat in the Hat.

To read a history of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite,
check out
NASA’s website.

I took some golf lessons years ago but wasn’t very good at it.
My grandfather loved golf after his retirement and I think my
younger brother plays. However, golf was not a big part of my
life until our neighbor took it up. He has been practicing in
his back yard. For months now, we and all the surrounding
neighbors have been finding his golf balls in our yards. A few
weeks ago, five of us surrounded him at a neighborhood BarBQ to
tease him about his new passion and gently ask him to practice
somewhere else.

Early last Saturday, we heard a great THUMP! on the side
of our house. Another golf ball appeared in the yard. Last Sunday,
we came home from church to find a second floor window shattered and
a golf ball below. Our neighbor was very responsive to our request:
he has been busy measuring the frame and getting someone to replace the
window. The sliding glass is double paned and tinted, with a
metal frame, so it is not an easy fix.

He says he has sworn off golf.

I am still learning to use our new photo scanner and enjoying
the discovery of historic, memorable, and funny family photos
as I sort through old boxes. Here are some of the recent
best finds:

2003, Katy and Angel Fish off Grand Cayman:	2005, Paul’s First Dive, Monterey:
2006, John and church kids:	2006, family computing:	.

Images by John Plocher, Katy Dickinson, John Sack (Copyright 2003, 2005, 2006)