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Tobin Fricke: Letter from the Real World
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EECS alum Tobin Fricke graduated from the College of Engineering
in Spring 2003. Through a series of letters, Forefront
has stayed in touch with Tobin, tracking his life after Berkeley.
ANGELA PRIVIN PHOTO |
Memorial Glade
UC Berkeley campus
It turns out that applying to graduate school is something like
a full-time job. The fun finally began after the submitted applications
had time to gestate. In the early weeks of February, the e-mails
started rolling in, some containing the welcoming words, “Congratulations!
We invite you to our recruiting weekend, at our expense.”
Only then did I breathe a deep sigh of relief.
And then the March flurry of airline reservations and hotels and
endless schmoozing began, a lot like academic speed-dating, where
in half-hour appointments you meet with as many faculty as possible,
at each meeting hoping the right sparks would lead to a long-term
student-advisor relationship.
Then came the hardest part, three good offers on the table: two
fancy private schools with fellowships, one bustling public school
down south. Would it be the small school in the middle of nowhere,
cold climate, nearly ideal research program? Or the big school,
warm climate, friendly people, not as well ranked, and not the
research program I had in mind? I had six days to decide and every
day a new idea of where to go.
In the end, I chose Rochester’s doctoral program in physics,
a program known for its excellent work in quantum optics and fusion.
I’m excited about graduate school, about settling in for
another intensive period of studying, working, and exploring a
new place. In a sense, physics is at the center of science, and
physics and engineering have a complementary relationship, each
utterly impossible without the other.
Berkeley has been an easy place to be during this spring “between”
time. I worked part time at LBNL and took courses in differential
geometry and solid-state physics. Over the summer I went back
to UCSD’s Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
Geophysics combines physics and engineering and allows you to
tramp about the earth. It’s further proof that engineers
can sneak their way into any field! I worked with ROADNet, a project
which is taking a unified wireless network that brings geophysical
data from distributed sensors from the field into the lab. It
was a good mix of CS theory (in routing data and developing algebras
to describe operations on data streams), productive coding, and
fieldwork.
And now I’m packing for Rochester. There are still some
uncertainties. My youngest brother is in Iraq with the U.S. Marine
Corps Reserve, working long days in 112° F heat, he says,
his “hands crusty with sticky half-dried hydraulic fluid
from repairing helicopters.” He e-mails the family as often
as he can. Sometime it feels ridiculous to be working a comfy
research job knowing he’s out there.
Still, my work is here. I have some doubts about Rochester. I
dreamed of going to MIT as a high school student, but after six
years in and around Berkeley, I believe this is the finest institution
in America. I hope my experience in upstate New York will be as
successful as my time at Cal.
TOBIN FRICKE
tobin@alumni.eecs.berkeley.edu
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