Full Speed Ahead!

News is good from Georgia Tech!

After a tough semester playing "catch-up" to all the ChE's proceeding along the graduate track, McKenzie came through with excellent grades and then swung into prepping for her PhD Qualifying Exams.

Her written component for the Qualifiers met all specs, and her oral component (completed yesterday) appears to have gone very well. At this point, CNN (Campus Nosy Network) is making the call for this election IN FAVOR of Candidate McKenzie!

She reports that after a suitable decompression with Cataclysm (apt name?) she will resume studies toward her doctorate.

By way of celebration, she admitted "Graham" into the close company of her academic community. (Name change is perhaps pending.)

Moving On With Life

McKenzie took a year away from the books.  Seems that California colleges were imploding and scholarships were being stripped from people who had been awarded them. So it's just as well she didn't end up at Stanford or Caltech.

After a stint in retail, she qualified for a job at BMW, building cars. That ain't easy; the testing (mental, physical, and medical) is rigorous. She has decided she does NOT like nerve conduction studies!

A couple months on the production line is good for focusing your mind on exactly why you want to go to grad school. After retaking the GRE (and banging the score out the roof, this time) and interviewing with a Georgia Tech prof who happens to be doing research right in the sweet spot of where McK wants to concentrate, she applied to and was accepted at Georgia Tech for studies leading to the PhD in Chemical & Biological Engineering.

 

Well, off she goes here to start her new life as a teaching assistant.

Mom and Dad go back to having ONE boomerang kid :)

Recent Disguises

OK, we know McKenzie is fond of:
a) weird costumes
b) pointy steel
Let's add facepaint.

Our New Engineer

FINALLY! The payoff arrives for all the work.

Through the Sally Port (forbidden by tradition between freshman orientation and graduation), through the Lovett Hall arch, and out to a grateful family.



After four years of enduring Texas, McKenzie snags her sheepskin and joins The Real World as a BioEngineer.




(P.S. - Look out, World!)

Rare Appearances

One gets the urge to update this page with something, but with McK off in Texas most of the year, her appearances locally are rare. Her MySpace may get updated more often, but this page has been sitting 18 months. So just to do something, here are a couple shots from the last time we saw her.





Here she is all dolled up for her cousin Brittany's wedding. (And she is a doll, isn't she?)
That's her cousin Red looking dapper next to her.

















We had to hold an early birthday party, because she needed to return to her job in the genetics lab.

That's Carpe Noctem on her T - "seize the night." We learned that meant "go on dungeon raids with her clan on W.o.W."

Rice is Nice!

McKenzie doesn't give her poor parents much to work with, regarding her life a thousand miles away! So, we'll just consider this a stub blog, which she can flesh out, when she finds time and/or motivation.


What we can show are some pictures from last year. McKenzie joined the Marching Owl Band (MOB) as a Show Assistant. This meant that she built props and acted in the halftime shows at home football games. It also meant she got to wear a cool fedora!





Life as a MOBster has made her one dangerous lady! Why, only this autumn she and the crew (her crew now, as she moved up to co-Producer) constructed a working trebuchet!









Those who knew McKenzie before the MOB knew she had a fascination for sharp, pointy objects. College hasn't stopped that!









On occasion, she can show a more demure side. Of course, even then, it must be done with McKenzie-style. Here she is, off to a renaissance festival with a couple of her MOB pals. OF COURSE they had to go in garb!










From all the costumes, you'd be forgiven if you didn't realize that McKenzie is a focused, intense student who wants to get her doctorate in bioengineering and teach at the university level. So here we serve up a somewhat ordinary look at McKenzie in her day-to-day student apparel.