Back from Philadelphia and my last grad school visit (Hallelujah!). It’s neat to see different schools but it’s also exhausting, and I’ll be glad to stay in one place for a while.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of Philadelphia. In my mind the city has always had something of a reputation for crime and “grit,” and I wasn’t sure whether UPenn’s location would be an advantage or a disadvantage. It turns out that everyone I talked to loved Philly, and I can definitely see why. While there are certainly some bad parts of the city, most of the area around the University is quite nice, and the downtown is close by. In fact, I was surprised to hear that many students lived downtown (in “Center city”), which I had imagined would be a financial impossibility. Instead, price was cited as a great advantage of Philadelphia over other large cities, and the rents seemed fairly similar to those in Ithaca. I still don’t exactly consider myself a “city person”, but the cultural opportunities of a big city are hard to ignore.

The city was nice, but the real purpose of the visit was to see the department, and we spent all day Friday visiting professors and grad students. The database group at Penn is quite large and seems to have lots of ties to the rest of the department. The group seems to be focused largely on core database issues rather than applications (although those were certainly present too), and I think a lot of the decision between Cornell and Penn is going to revolve around deciding how committed I am to doing database work and whether my theoretical leanings tend more towards algorithms or logic.

At some level the hard part is done now – I don’t have to travel any more or write any more applications, but I really don’t know how I’m going to make a decision. Both schools look great, and I suppose I should be comforted by the fact that there isn’t really a bad choice. Still, I can only pick one, and at some level that’s the hardest part.

I visited Ithaca last weekend to check out the computer science department at Cornell. I didn’t get there early enough to go on the campus tour, but what I saw of the compus was quite nice. It was snowing most of the time I was there, so I didn’t take too many pictures, but I did get a couple of nice shots from my hotel window.

The computer science department seems pretty great as well. I got to meet a few of my heroes (Jon Kleinberg, Dexter Kozen, John Hopcroft, etc.), but more than that the department seemed to really emphasize collaboration. Everyone I talked to mentioned the fact that everybody knew each other and that professors and students from different research groups frequently work with each other.

I didn’t get to see quite as much of Ithaca as I would have liked, but it seems like a nice town. It feels several orders of magnitude larger than Northfield, and there seemed to be a particularly impressive array of restaurants and cafes. I got to eat at Moosewood which I gather is fairly well known, and there seemed to be more Thai restaurants near Cornell than there are restaurants of any variety in Northfield.

I’m still not particularly thrilled with the location of Ithaca – it’s an hour-and-a-half drive from the Syracuse airport, and there are no large cities close by (NYC is about 4.5 hours away). That said, there does seem to be a lot going on around Cornell and the students I talked to didn’t seem to feel particularly isolated.

In any case, I’m leaving to visit the University of Michigan tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how that goes.