Saket Vora

My apologies for not posting in over a month. And what a crazy last month this has been. I’m going to pledge to post at least one update every week from now on. It will help keep me sane. To get everyone caught up, here are some notable events of the past month:

- went to a luncheon with Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon. His daughter is a faculty member in the college of management and he was here to give an NC State student a scholarship.

- took the GRE on 14 October. Bombed it. It was really bad, though I did ace the writing portion of it.

-  The NC State chapter of Nourish International has gotten underway. Lindsay and I have coordinated two meetings so far.

- Nicholas Kristof, two time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times has agreed to come to NC State on February 6-7, 2007 to give an address about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Kristof has been tireless in his attempt to raise world awareness over this catastrophe. I am on a speaker committee for that so we have been meeting and working on planning the events surround his address.

-  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) came to speak on campus for First Lady Mary Easley’s Millenium Speaker Series. That morning, he had been in the Oval Office for the signing of the enemy combatants bill, then flew immediately down to Raleigh. He gave a tremendous speech about the bill and his approach to politics. He’s a character guy — I disagree with nearly all of his stances on the issues but he seems to be heading in the right direction when it comes to military justice. Also, Dave Foley is the guy to play Senator Graham if a movie is ever made about him.

-  My good friend Naman came back from a 4-month assignment to a rural state in India heading up a polio vaccine. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 3 years. He was in the states for a few weeks before heading to Cambodia to work in a malaria research lab. From January to July he will be back in India on behalf of the WHO/CDC. He has already been offered admittance to UNC-Chapel Hill’s highly rated M.D./Ph.D. program. Naman is a tour-de-force of a human being and is an inspiration for me. He visited me on campus and we had a really nice talk.

-  I volunteered at the North Carolina Science Olympiad Coach’s Institute on October 27-28. I gave a talk to student leaders on ideas of leadership, as well as prepared and presented four sessions of Simple Machines event and four sessions on the Fermi Questions event.

- I applied for the Hertz Fellowship, which provides money for graduate school. I have little chance of getting this, but it was good for me doing it cause it helped pave the way for others.

- I went with Deanna (an apartment suitemate who is in her first year here as a grad student in soil science from Michigan), Greg, Ben, and Jordan to the NC State vs Georgia Tech football game. We did a really really tiny tailgate before. It was freezing cold…the whole game the temperature hovered just above freezing. It was my first chance to see the newly renovated Carter-Finley football stadium, and it looks amazing. We lost, but it was a good game to watch. Check out my photos page for pictures from the game.

- Jordan’s parents held a surprise birthday dinner at the upscale restaurant 518 West on Glenwood Avenue. It was a nice night.

- Took the GRE again and this time did better. I hate that test.
- Applied for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This one was a doozy. We have to write a two-page research proposal. I procrastinated bigtime on this one so the night before the application is due I continue digging around and realize my desired proposal was already done by a research group and they got amazing results. I ended up staying awake the entire night in the lab working on that proposal and ECE 511 hw.

- I had a wonderful lunch with John Gajda, my mentor from Progress Energy. He came over to NC State and we ate at Mitch’s Tavern. John is thinking about starting a part-time Ph.D with Dr. Baran over at NC State.

- Today I shifted gears to my graduate school applications and now I’m working to get all of those done. I need to get letters of recommendation out.  I am applying to Georgia Tech, University of Maryland, Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA.

- One day Greg, Jordan, and I went and saw Christopher Nolan’s new film The Prestige. Excellent cast, great film. Today Greg and I went and saw Borat. Hilarious film.

- My home sports teams are doing terribly.

- I voted on November 7th and was very happy to see the Democrats take control of Congress.

- The week before the election, I told my friends with confidence that Donald Rumsfeld would step down before the end of November. The stunning victory by the Democrats made that happen a lot sooner than expected, and he resigned the day after the elections. Yep, I called it. 

Anyway, it’s 3:24am right now and I need to wake up early to go by the post office and Kinkos before class. Peace.
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