Tonight I went to a BME recruiting dinner for new/prospective students. The event was held at the Hilton Garden Inn downtown. There were about 10-12 students there who had been accepted into the program but had not yet made final decisions on where they were going to go. There were nice little perks for the current students who decided to help out with the recruiting weekend. There was curbside valet parking charged to the BME department. We got a nice dinner tonight, and tomorrow we get to go to the Oasis for dinner.

But that comes no where close to what the prospective students got. Each of them were flown out to Austin from whereever they were at. And they each got individual rooms at the newly renovated Hilton. The rooms are giant suite-style rooms each with plasma HDTVs, and queen size Sleep Number beds. That's pretty posh. Granted, there's a big push to recruit these students, but when I was being recruited by schools I never got anything crazy like this.

At dinner tonight one of the professors joined our table and began asking the prospectives about what they were looking for in a graduate school. A lot of the students were asking about what Austin was like as a city, what the weather was like, what fun things there were to do around here. Afterwards, I asked the prof what his own personal criteria were. He said three things: Resources, faculty, and collegiality amongst the faculty themselves. He thought that being concerned about the city, location and things like that were almost ridiculous. I disagreed with him, but hey, I live in this city and I can honestly say that it made a difference in my decision to come and stay at UT for school.