If you're familiar with classmates.com, you know they have some pretty cool stuff. But in order for someone to read what you've written in your bio, or see a pic you posted, etc., they have to be willing to pay to become gold members. Argh! Well, you already saw more pics than the one I've got there, so here are the main pieces of what I wrote to post there (plus a minor update).
what have you done since graduating? where are you now?
Went to Rice University for 1 year, then took a leave of absence to figure out what I wanted to do with my life! The leave turned into 4 yrs, during which I got married (to the guy I dated for the last half of senior year). When I was ready to go back to college, though, the marriage didn't last long. I returned to Rice, then got enough fellowships that I felt I had to go to grad school. Worked for a year, then moved to NY to attend Cornell for a computer science PhD. Met my husband there, about a year before becoming too ill to make progress in the PhD program. The CS dept offered me a leave to recuperate, but while out I discovered that I didn't need a PhD to get the kind of job I wanted. So I moved to the Boston area (lots of high-tech jobs) and have been loving my work (most of the time) ever since! My boyfriend (at the time) didn't care where he went after college, so he came with me. We married in March, 2000, and both work in computer science / software / engineering careers. We bought a house in August 2001, so we'll be around Boston for a while...
Minor-update: I seem to have contracted Lyme Disease sometime in May 2003. Only about 35% of people get the characteristic "bull's-eye rash", and guess what... So my first indication was when my left knee blew up (just about literally - it was quite literally so swollen it couldn't get any bigger at all!) in late January 2004. I've been on crutches most of the time since, with a few brief periods of being able to get by without them for distances up to 30 yards or so at a time. The first dr that looked at it didn't test for Lyme, and there was a lot of internal damage to the knee (ruptured Baker's cyst, sprained stabilization muscles, torn miniscus, etc.), so even though there was no known injury, it was treated as a traumatic injury with strictly mechanical damage. After a couple of months of physical therapy didn't get me the expected range of motion improvement, a 2nd MRI showed lots of extraneous loose floating tissue in the knee. (By this time my left elbow was also swelling oddly and bothering me, but no dr thought the 2 swollen joints were related.) The unattached tissue was rated as requiring surgery, and I had an arthroscopy(sp?) on my knee in early May 2004. The surgery went ok, but the orthoscopic surgeon declared that whatever was wrong, it wasn't mechanical - and referred me to a rheumatologist. Who immediately ran a Lyme test, which came back wildly positive...
Anyway, sparing all the gory details of the treatment and what recovery I've managed so far, I'm still on crutches but have reasonable hope that I'll be off them by the end of 2005, one way or another... (I'd just as soon avoid redo-ing the surgery, but if it worked it would be the faster overall recovery. So I'm trying the last ditch medical treatment plan, which has never been known to take longer than 9 months, if it was going to work at all...) Hey - until January I thought this was just the way the rest of my life was going to be, so I'm reasonably happy about the prospect of being off the crutches (and being able to do cardio!!) by the end of the year!
I generally had crushes on about 5 or more guys at a time. Some of the most memorable (and in some sense, lasting) ones were Mark Acocella, Kevin Muery, Earl Petersen and David Burnett. I'd love to know how any of you are doing now, and how your life has gone!!!
Yeah, I'd do it all over again, but *so* differently!!! For one thing, I'd have gone out with some (all?!!) of the guys that I had crushes on!! (only if they were interested, obviously...) And I'd worry less about being shy and ugly, and what people might think if I'd done this or that, and concentrate on finding out what they really did think - of life and other important things, and how they felt about themselves and the world they live in.