Johns Hopkins
August 24, 2006
We woke up in Culpeper and while mom and nikhil ate breakfast, Appa took me to the regional hospital that I was born in and the Mountainview apartments, the place where we lived. He explained to me that in the winter, they had to take their laundry to this laundry room… so I took a picture of the laundry room, as well as the pictures of the doors of the places we lived. We picked up mom and nikhil, went back to Mountainview and took some more photos… then we went to Swift, which now has a huge security system in front of it, so we couldn’t go inside. I took a picture of the front, though.
And then we drove to Baltimore, Maryland… on the way, I took pictures of the Delaware bridge… we got there, and I noticed how everything was made of brick and marble. Lots of big, brick colonial buildings with marble pillars in front. It wasn’t that bad. I had gone in thinking that Baltimore would be a run-down, awful town because that’s what dad had described it as. But it was… quaint. It didn’t click w/ me immediately like Chicago, though. But it seemed like a decent place to live, and I wasn’t displeased.
Johns Hopkins is located practically next door to the Baltimore Museum of Art (or contemporary art, can’t remember). The - ooh, ok so I made the zoomed pic of one of the two lions that straddle the museum as my background and it looks SO COOL. I also like the dragon-gargoyle background I have from U Chicago, too.
Anyway, so the museum has two lions on the sides of it and they’re really cool-lookin’. And so we parked in the museum area (parking in Baltimore is ridiculous, just like in any city) and we walked to John Hopkins… we didn’t go through the front gate and we had to ask around to get to the admissions building.
John Hopkins was nice, and it really cleared up some of the misapprehensions I had about the university. For one thing, the desk I went up to in order to sign up for the info tour- it had folders w/ extra information all packed together nicely for ppl. No other university did that for the prospective families… and also, our tour guide was super nice. I didn’t know John Hopkins had public health as an undergraduate major (!!!) and its bioengineering department is pretty much the best out there, AND it doesn’t require specific classes (the administration kept emphasizing that it’s our education and we should be in charge of it- so they only require that we take classes from diff fields, but they don’t specify which fields). Immediately after meeting our tour guide, who was a perky and really enthusiastic girl (but not hyper, like the NU tour guide. Yikes.), I realized the rumors of Hopkins as being a competitive, cut-throat place were wrong. I went up to the tour guide after the tour and spoke to her about that, and she said, “yeah- that’s exactly what I thought, too, when I came here with my dad for the first time. I told him ‘no WAY am I coming here’ and I was completely wrong and I love it here’”. Her tour guide was done well- though she didn’t have the pizzazz and mind-blowing quality of the tour guide of U Chicago (thanks again, Shirley! He was a gem ^~), she didn’t have the artificial tour-guide-ishness of the NU person (sorry Shirlz. She sucked. Really. Ugh.) and even though the tour guide really liked NU, it didn’t come through in her tour. This girl’s enthusiasm did. And I guess what I’d say the best things about tours are the little anecdotes that people give from personal experience and from their friends and other students. This student had a lot of those. She gave interesting information and provided examples from her own experience in JHU classes. She showed us a lecture hall (gorgeous. Love the chairs.) and she was completely honest, and said that this lecture hall wasn’t indicative of all of the lecture halls on campus, AND she pointed out something that I don’t think another tour guide would have mentioned because it is a downside. She told us that one downside of the freshman dorms is that they don’t have air-conditioning! Mostly sophomores and above live in a dorm that does have air-conditioning. So I was impressed that she pointed that out.
Also what impressed me was how involved she was on campus. She described a lot of the events she went to, cultural events (omgz JHU is 40% Asian American and Indian! And it definitely shows in the number of Indian groups on campus. YAY) and how she went to this Persian bazaar thing, a Middle-Eastern dinner… she said that many of her friends have made really good friends with the professors (no other tour guide had mentioned anything about the relationship between the students+professors, just that the professors were easily accessible, etc).
So there are a lot of things I like about JHU.
Things I like/love:
- student’s aren’t competitive. They’re very studious, and she mentioned (hahahah) that the levels of the library get progressively quieter as you go down, and that they made it so that natural light can get into all floors (yay! Suzallo’s library has no natural light o_o) and how she’s heard that students get dirty looks if they go down to the lowest level w/ squeaky shoes (yay!). She also said that the ‘walk of shame’ is when at 3 am (the library closes) students walk over to the other study room just down the pathway to continue studying lol
- LOTS of research. LOTS and LOTS and LOTS. Research is hiiiighhly recommended, and JHU is like a fountain of wealth for premed and public health and bioengineering students because you have the famous JHU hospital nearby, and a BUNCH of new research centers devoted to health. I’m very psyched about that.
- Big Indian group! Maybe I’d find people who’d like carnatic music here and I could do concerts here or even make some money on the side teaching ppl.
- Ballroom dancing club! Ahahahhahahaa. Ahem.
- There is some greenery on campus- it’s def not as green as Princeton, but it’s reasonable. I wish the trees were shadier and taller, but that’s ok.
- Nice clock tower! It has the whole chimes and everything at every hour.
- I do like the marble pillars.
- I love the latin motto thing of the university, which means “the truth shall set you free”
- Amazing fries. At the cafeteria. Best I’ve ever tasted.
- Merit scholarships!
- They totally encourage double-majors
- More academic freeeeeeeedom
Things I don’t like
- I wish Baltimore clicked w/ me better… I kept comparing it to Chicago and thinking ‘gawoiehgaowigaweoigawg’
- I’m not so fond of the brick pathways and all of the brick! Too much brick. I wish JHU had some ivy…. The place would look GORGEOUS with the ivy and brick and marble…
- The marble is ridiculously blinding when it’s so hella sunny outside.
- Not as many study abroad stuff…
So… suffice to say, with all of the other things that are so great about the place, I’ll definitely apply to JHU.
We then went to an information session- the guy that headed that was pretty cool. Well-spoken. And he emphasized how he wants students that show initiative (me! Me! Please!) and are driven to pursue what they want (*jumps up and down*). He was pretty cool, too. And another thing was, the two admissions guys didn’t know our tour guide and when they spoke together and she introduced herself they were really cool.
I wish I had stayed longer at JHU to go inside some more of the buildings! But we had to skidaadddle to get to the next place we were going.. NEW YORK!
Well anyway so we went to Jersey City… ppl do drive crazy in Jersey, but they’re nice. They’re not mean or anything. One guy started honking at us for no reason and I thought ‘wtf’ and then he opened his window and asked us if he could help us with where we needed to go. He was a nice guy.
When we entered the place it looked like a bad neighborhood… as we continued into the city, the huge, glass financial buildings loomed up in front of us.
Apparently a lot of Indians come from India and stay in the suites around these buildings and commute back and forth from India to Jersey. We’re staying in a place called the Candlewood Suites which is REALLY NICE. I really, really like the place. And the room SMELLS great. Oh, man. It’s the little details, I tell ya. And it has a fridge and cupboards and it looks like an apartment, literally. Well, ppl live in it for 6 months at an end, so yeah it’d be like one hehe.
I didn’t realize there’d be so many Indians in Jersey- well, I heard about it from my mom but I never really associated New Jersey as a place where there’d be a huge Indian community. Apparently the Indian community is large enough that it’s gotten the attention of white supremacists. In Jersey, there are ppl called the ‘dot busters’- the dot standing for the bindi Indians wear, of course. And those people carry out hate crimes against Indians in Jersey… kinda scary.
There’s this great Indian restaurant across the street from this place called Amiya. Apparently it means Mango (mom’s amazing Sanskrit knowledge lol)… I asked her what language it was from and she says maybe Bengali. Hm.
Anyhow, the food was great, and the Indian couple that owned the place were really, really cool people! The guy studied at NJIT (technology school) and he works w/ the same sort of the stuff my dad does so they got along well… his wife started off like that too, but then she decided to open a restaurant and it looks great! It’s supposed to be Indian contemporary food or something like that. Ahahaha and one of the funny things I remember was when the guy asked us if we wanted the food ‘medium or hot’ and my dad asked, ‘American hot or Indian hot?’ and the guy actually replied, ‘Indian hot’ for once! Well it makes sense now since so many Indians come there from India, but that was cool.
The owner and her husband were really nice- the owner grew up in Jersey, and both of them said the NY schools are great and that they have a big Indian crowd.
Tomorrow, I go to NY! The train ride from NJ city is only 10 mins or so… tomorrow should be cool!