Saket Vora

Yesterday was the Big Game, and a group of us left Stanford early in the morning to make the trip deep into enemy territory to cheer on our team. Joey, Bikiran, Nader, and two of Nader’s fellow Studio 1 residents (Adrian and Meir) were in tow.

The Caltrain + BART put us in Berkeley about an hour before the 12:30pm kick-off, and we all inhaled some pizza and much needed coffee (waking up at 8am on  Saturday? what?)  and started making our way to Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. Nader and I were buoyed by the awesome news that NC State defeated UNC 41-10 that morning (I was tracking the game while on the train).

The Stanford students started getting pumped up as we made our way to the student gate. Cheers and chants were shouted at the surrounding Cal fans, and even the cheer “Hennessy! Hennessy! Hennessy!” went up as we spotted Stanford’s President Hennessy making his way through the crowd as well, stopping to shake a few students’ hands.

This was the first time I’ve watched a football in an opposing team’s stadium, and in this type of ‘bowl’ stadium as well. Though it seats 75,000, it isn’t anywhere near as nice as Carter-Finley or Stanford’s Stadium. The game started off pretty well but soon Stanford became totally unraveled. We watched helplessly as Cal dumped 28 straight points on us. Everything was going right for them, and they even pulled off some sweet trick plays for TDs. It was still fun to be there and cheer on the team and our band.

Who said grad students have no school spirit?

After the game I went up with Adrian and Meir the hills behind Berkeley, where Derek, Danika, and I took in some gorgeous views of the bay at the UAEM conference. It’s pretty cool that from the center of Berkeley’s campus, there is a direct view to the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance.

Half the group left to head back to Stanford, but Adrian and I walked around Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue before meeting back up with Nader. I called my friend Melih to see if he wanted to do dinner, and soon we were back on the BART headed towards Powell St.  We went to Santorini‘s mediterranean restaurant where the food was actually quite good though the service was inattentive. I got a call from Mom with the good news that they were in ATL about to catch the plane home to RDU. Whew. We spent a while there talking and catching up before heading to the Mission District, where we met a group of Melih’s friends who also went to NC State. I always like meeting other Wolfpackers who have come out here. Some random tidbits: Liz (Lisa?) was on the NCSU crew team from 2004-2007 and knew Greg, Donny, and Ben. Another guy is working at Google (on Google Analytics) and I started overhearing a conversation he was having…with me catching words like “brain”, “light”, “controlling neurons”. I interjected – “wait, are you talking about Karl Deisseroth?” And he said, yeah, Deisseroth had come to Google to give a tech talk to the employees there and how it was really cool. We chatted about it because I had learned about Deisseroth’s work during my neuroengineering class and had written a report on his optogenic neuromodulation technique. Pretty neat chance occurrance!

Nader, Adrian, and I had to catch the last train back to Palo Alto, so we took off. I couldn’t help but notice that the BART stations were plastered with iPod Nano advertisements, almost to the point of absurdity:

(click for full size and count for 10 ads)

A great, fun day to kick off Thanksgiving break. The rest of the week? Work.