Where did Fred go to college?

[indri]

In "A Hole in the World" we see flashbacks of Fred leaving home for LA. She says she's leaving for the graduate physics program at UCLA and her parents' reaction indicates that she's not lived in Los Angeles before. Indeed, it's strongly suggested that she's been studying at a local university until this point.

But she has already studied under Seidel as an undergraduate. In "Supersymmetry", she says she was a history major until she attended one of his courses, after which she changed to physics. Seidel's office is clearly in LA by the time Fred is sent to Pylea, so this implies that she studied under him at another institution nearby before beginning graduate work with him in LA. He must have been offered a job in Los Angeles (or maybe he was in Texas as a visiting lecturer), and Fred followed.

I don't know where Fred first studied. I want her to have studied at the University of Texas at Austin, because then I could describe her life there with a fair degree of accuracy. I would have bought coffee at the same stall she would have gone to, toured the labs she would have worked in, waited aeons at the same elevators. And it's not impossible that she went there: it's a good school for a bright girl, with excellent history and physics courses, and it's far enough away from her parents that she'd have to live in Austin during the week but not so far that she couldn't visit them on the weekend (Austin is a ninety minute drive from San Antonio). But we have, AFAIK, no way of telling if she went there or to any of the other universities in east central Texas.

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I should persuade the SO to watch "Supersymmetry" with me. I half-understand the physics references, but not enough to tell when Mutant Enemy start making it up. Ed Witten, for example, is name-dropped and that made me laugh, because he's a one-man industry and at one point the SO was studying his "Witten Complex". But I have no real idea who "Nomar Garciaparra and Sammy Sosa" are, except that I think they're probably sports stars. I know what a WIMP is and I wonder if the Klein of Kaluza-Klein is the bottle guy, but more than that I do not know. I think the SO would have a better chance of stripping the science from the pseudo-science because multi-dimensional geometry is his field: I stick with nice safe Euclidean space as much as I can.

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Does anyone have any thoughts on what kind of job Fred's dad has/had? Fred's mother, if you recall, drove a bus and drove it well. Her parents strike me as intelligent but not over-educated: he'd maybe have a position of some responsibility that required smarts and superior common sense, but not a degree.

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

But she has already studied under Seidel as an undergraduate. In "Supersymmetry", she says she was a history major until she attended one of his courses, after which she changed to physics. Seidel's office is clearly in LA by the time Fred is sent to Pylea, so this implies that she studied under him at another institution nearby before beginning graduate work with him in LA. He must have been offered a job in Los Angeles (or maybe he was in Texas as a visiting lecturer), and Fred followed.

That's acceptable and common. I used to know a woman who was an engineering grad student who followed her professor from Indiana to Georgia.

I don't know where Fred first studied. I want her to have studied at the University of Texas at Austin, because then I could describe her life there with a fair degree of accuracy. ... But we have, AFAIK, no way of telling if she went there or to any of the other universities in east central Texas.

Assert it, then. I hear that Austin's wild enough that any self-respecting, god-fearing

I should persuade the SO to watch "Supersymmetry" with me. I half-understand the physics references, but not enough to tell when Mutant Enemy start making it up. ... But I have no real idea who "Nomar Garciaparra and Sammy Sosa" are, except that I think they're probably sports stars.

Sammy Sosa plays for the Chicago Cubs. Nomar plays for the Boston Red Sox. Both are big home-run hitters, IIRC. Sammy was neck and neck for the home run record a few years ago, and Nomar I know because the recurring Boston characters on Saturday Night Live all love him.

And do it. Have him watch.

[indri]

Sammy Sosa plays for the Chicago Cubs. Nomar plays for the Boston Red Sox. Both are big home-run hitters, IIRC.

I take it that means they play baseball? :)

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

Yes. Baseball. And, without doing some research myself, I couldn't tell you much more than that.

[irfikos.livejournal.com]

fred's dad reminds me of my uncle. very much of my uncle.

he's a supervisor for a highway construction contractor. repairing roads. building new roads.

whenever we travel anywhere with him he's fond of pointing out what type of surface we're riding on and what kind of techniques were used to construct the road. and he gets a kick out of pointing out detours where he has closed roads. and telling stories about idiotic motorists who try to go around his roadblocks and end up needing to be extricated somehow.

i suggest construction of some kind. he has a good build for it. you have to be intelligent and know what you're doing (as a supervisor at least) but don't necessarily have to be formally "educated." it's a job you can just work your way up in and gain knowledge through experience more than books.

that's my suggestion.

[indri]

he's a supervisor for a highway construction contractor. repairing roads. building new roads.

Heh. I'm laughing because he reminds me of the SO's dad, who used to work in something very similar. He knows everything about concrete.

And road-building is good because they're always building and rebuilding roads in Texas.

Seems we're agreed :)

[akam1.livejournal.com]

I always saw Fred's dad as some type of supervisor. Like a warehouse supervisor or working for the City as a road crew supervisor or motor pool supervisor or possibly working Civil Service for the military as a supervisor of something.

I think it's very possible that Fred went to UT in Austin or even UT in San Antonio.

[indri]

It seems that everyone's of a similar opinion. That's good, as it meshes well with the couple of people I was planning to model him on, a construction supervisor I knew in Austin and the SO's dad.

I think I'll send Fred to UT-Austin because I never visited the campus in San Antonio.