higgs

I fell behind on my journal writing but I should manage to hit the highlights of the last few days. On the 5th we had a campus tour. There are a lot of things I like about this school so much so that I was thinking about applying to gradschool here. After the tour I'm starting to think that there are too many not me things. They have 50k students during the regular year in a really small town. From the way people talk about the campus and town there is a serious traffic and over crowding problem. I'm not one to be around a lot of people. They have a lot of traditions and school pride stuff that just seems like total BS to me. I'm sure that other people find it fun but it seems ridiculous to me. Mainly the wildcats, the not walking under some tree alone, not walking on certain patches of grass, and their weird fake military the cadets. As a veteran I see it as they are either playing at military life or they think they are some how associated with the military. Maybe one of you could clarify that Aggie tradition to me.
After the tour we took some safety training then went to a big BBQ the school put on for all of the REU students. A lot more people showed up than they were expecting so the place was packed and they all most ran out of food. They gave us a bag to carry our lunches in for the brown bag lunch lectures and I got a free XXL graduate studies T-shirt.

On the 6th we had a lab tour where we went around to some of the labs and talked to the people that worked there. We went to the urban entomology lab where we talked about termites, fire ants and bedbugs. The prof there (like all the labs) seem really cool and passionate about their field. It seems like most of the profs were not planning on entomology when they first started school but some what fell into it. We talked to Pete Crouter in the Biological control lab where they use parasites to kill off invasive species. He even has a species of parasitic wasp named after him. It was interesting talking to him about speciation in the host plant of the caterpillar, the host caterpillar to the wasp and the wasp itself. After the tours we had lunch then dispersed into our own labs. Lee and I got to finally have a sit down talk with Dr.Hamer about what we were going to be doing for our projects. We talked to some of the people that work in the lab and they all seem really cool. The Hamer's had a pool and pie iron party at their house for everyone in the lab so we got to talk to some of the other lab people in a more informal setting. Two of the guys seem really cool Chris who is into star trec and Eddie Izard, and Michael who gave us a ride and is teaching us how to sort mosquitoes.