Pittsburgh, here we come

On July 28th we will be getting in our sporty little PT Cruiser (oh yea we got a new car...I guess I should talk about that...OK I just did) and moving to Pittsburgh, PA.  Ok so not all of our stuff fits in the PT Cruiser so there will be a moving truck taking our stuff as well.

We have already signed a lease agreement on an apartment in Pittsburgh and we took this picture from our new living room.

For anybody that believed that I took this photo from our living room....I have some great stuff to sell you! ;)

I (Justin) have been accepted into a very exciting dual PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University and the Universidade de Porto (in Portugal).  We will spend two years in Pittsburgh, and then three years in Porto, Portugal and then I will walk away with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from both schools.

We first made the decision to go to graduate school about this time last year.  We weren't sure where we would go, or where we should even apply, but we felt that it was the right decision for our family.  So I decided to visit the University of Idaho and Washington State University (WSU) to ask questions and get a feel for what graduate school would really be like.  I was dumb-founded when WSU offered to not only waive my tuition, but actually PAY ME to go to school there.  That lead to Stephanie needing to deflate my head as it had grown largely out of proportion, and then I started applying to any and every school I could imagine myself going to.  I figured if WSU was going to give me the red carpet, I should see who else would before committing.

Countless hours of writing application essays and filling out my entire life story countless times on each schools application later...I had applied to the following Schools:

MIT

Stanford

UCLA

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

University of Utah

University of Washington

University of Texas-Austin

WSU

Ohio State University
Every school except MIT and Stanford (who simply said sorry Charlie) made similar offers to the one WSU had made.  Most of them even paid for me to go and visit them!  So I spent five weekends in a row traveling to different schools, trying to decide which one would be the best fit.  

I was very excited about the offer CMU made and the possibility of going to Portugal. Stephanie, on the other hand, took quite a while to warm up to the possibility of living in Portugal for three years.  But none the less we made our final decision and now we are awaiting to embark on a journey of a lifetime as a young family!