Memoirs      
1970s America – An Indian student’s journey
by Dr. Anil K. Rajvanshi

Chapter 8

Looking for Better School?

When I arrived in UF at the end of 1974 the situation on the campus was pretty grim according to US standards. There was no electricity in the departments during the weekends and due to cost cutting measures phones were also disconnected from graduate student’s offices. Luckily I was given a good room in the main Mechanical Engineering building which I had to share with three other American graduate students. Two of them hardly ever came to the office so basically I had only one other graduate student in that room.

The students I encountered in the courses I took in my first quarter were much below the quality of my classmates at IITK. Besides the first course that I took under Dr. Farber was on Direct Energy Conversion and was quite a fiasco. I found out that he had little knowledge of theoretical material and presented no new insights other than what was written in the textbook. I questioned him one day in the class about it and he went on a tangent about how he was a great man and how dare a foreign graduate student question him. In fact my questioning must have rattled him quite a lot because he spent two full lectures berating me rather than answering the question. The 25-30 students who attended the class were also horrified and they told me that nobody questions the great Dr. Farber. Nevertheless they were happy that somebody had the guts to poke holes in what Farber was teaching.

This was my first real interaction with Dr. Farber for whom I had come all the way from India. This episode together with the quality of graduate students and the run down condition of Mechanical Engineering department suddenly made me aware that I may have come to the wrong place. Now I remembered the words of Mr. Sharma - the clerk in the Education ministry in New Delhi who had warned me that I was making a mistake in going to University of Florida. Thus I decided to leave UF and go to some other university at the earliest opportunity.

So I called the professor in Mechanical Engineering at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (UM) – the one whom I had befriended in IITK and told him about my predicament at UF. He was delighted to hear from me and immediately offered me admission in the graduate program since I already had Government of India (GOI) fellowship. He also said that he will match that fellowship with the department funds. Then he asked me my office phone number so he could call me back. I told him that because of cost cutting measures we do not have phones in our offices to which he replied “Not only we will take you in our department, but will give you an office with you own phone! All our graduate students have phones in their offices”. The offer was very tempting and hence I decided to go and visit UM and some of the other well known schools at the first opportunity. This was my first motivation to travel in US.

Dr. Farber being a sharp person must have seen something in me during the classroom exchange and so he became quite friendly towards me and started talking to me more often and discussing various issues on solar energy. He being a very knowledgeable person in solar energy, his insights on that subject was very illuminating and I started liking him. Still I thought it might be worthwhile to visit other universities and see the grass on the other side!

Since winter and spring quarters were nearly back to back it was not possible to go sight seeing in US for any length of time. I therefore decided to see America during the summer break.

A golden opportunity to do so arrived in the form of friendship with one Alok Krishen who was a graduate student in Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee. Alok had come to Gainesville to meet his friend and that is how I met him. We liked each other and so when he told me that he would be traveling to northeast US during summer break and was looking for a traveling companion, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Naturally we had to decide on a mutually acceptable timetable.

Alok had a very small car called SIMCA. I think it was one of the smallest cars available in US and barely seated 4 people. He had also bought it second hand for $ 250 but he assured me that it worked well and there would be no problem during the long trip. In order to share the cost of traveling we decided to have 4 people. So Alok got a Chinese student from FSU who wanted to go to Detroit for his brother’s wedding and I located another Indian student in UF who also wanted to travel in America. Out of the four of us only I did not know driving so my job was that of a navigator and to entertain others by singing and telling jokes etc.!

Our plan was to visit only those cities and places where we could stay with friends and relatives so as to avoid the hotel expenses. Alok who had come to US one year earlier than me had quite a few friends and relatives in different cities. In north-eastern university towns I had quite a number of my classmates, so we made the program of staying with as many of them. We had arranged the trip for about 20-days but had kept it flexible so that we could change our itinerary in case we liked a place.

We drove straight to Detroit to leave the Chinese student. After leaving him we traveled to major universities like Cornell, N.Y.; Princeton, N.J.; SUNY, Buffalo; Case Western University, Cleveland; University of Toronto; Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing; University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor; and University of Pittsburg. Since I was interested in Cornell, UM and Princeton, I spent time discussing with students there about the well-known professors in solar energy or thermal science. I always felt that the best judge of a professor are the students who can tell both his strong and the weak points.

In majority of cases I found out that since the professor was very famous he was traveling most of the times on lecture trips and the students hardly had any opportunity to interact with him. They interacted with each other more often and being a good school there were many bright students around who helped each other. Besides in the big universities like Cornell, UM, etc. getting a Ph.D. was like going through a factory assembly line. Publish 3-4 papers in 3-4 years of research time and you are out of the university with a Ph.D. Besides the type of projects that the students worked on were dictated very much by the professor and were focused and on narrow subject areas.

I on the other hand by now (more than 6 months had passed in UF) had found out that I was able to meet Farber at least once a day when he was in town, had total freedom to pursue whatever my interests were and could discuss with whichever professor I wanted in other departments. Since I was a very independent minded student with varying interests, I realized that the best course of action would be for me to pursue my Ph.D. at UF and try to learn as much as possible from the opportunities available. I never regretted this decision because I really learnt tremendously at UF under Farber and besides I also found a nice wife at UF!
Nevertheless this trip to various universities allowed me an opportunity to see some beautiful campuses of MSU, UM, Princeton, Cornell and University of Toronto. I also saw the ugly cities of Pittsburgh, Cleveland (Ohio) and Buffalo.

This was summer and yet in some cities like Ithaca, N.Y. where Cornell is located it was still quite cold. I suddenly realized that besides education, nice outdoor weather is also a necessity for enjoyable campus life. So this was a very chastising experience and I never again had any doubts about my UF education.
Staying with American friends and their families also allowed me to sample the American way of life. I found out that almost all the families that I stayed with were extremely hospitable, kind and gracious. America in 1970s was a wonderful place with openness, liberal outlook and tremendous freedom. Unfortunately later on American society became quite conservative because of the series of unfortunate incidents like Iran crisis in 1979, 9/11 etc.

I stayed with an American family in Dearborn Michigan. They were parents of my Reid Coop friend. His father was a senior manager in General Motors (GM), so this was also an opportunity to see the GM engine plant near Dearborn. Visiting this plant I saw first hand the powerhouse of American industrial might which was a great educational experience. During one of the evening dinners at their house somehow the discussion turned towards the responsibility of children towards their parents. When I told them that in Indian culture the children have the responsibility of taking care of their aged parents, my friend was immediately chided by his father that he should learn this lesson from me!

I have always believed that on the whole families in almost all countries are quite decent. It is the governments that bring in hatred. I therefore used to tell the foreign student administrators in UF that besides giving university education to foreign students provision should also be made for students to spend some time with an American host family.

The summer trip to Northeast was thoroughly enjoyable and was full of interesting episodes.

As we were passing through Georgia on our way to Detroit we ran out of gas. This was nearly midnight and we found ourselves in a small town called Macon, Georgia. As we were going round and round in this small town looking for a gas station a cop appeared flashing his car lights. When we told him our predicament he was very helpful and took us to the gas station. He and his colleagues started talking with us asking us where we were from so we told him that we were from India. “You came all the way from India in this small car?” he remarked.

Since we were students we tried to drive the whole night without stopping. This was partly to save on hotel bills and partly to take the Chinese student to Detroit as quickly as possible. All three of my travel mates took turns in driving and since I was the navigator I had to keep awake. As we were reaching Atlanta it must have been nearly 3 a.m. when I must have dozed off and was suddenly woken up by a loud noise of somebody honking feverishly.

The driver also slept on the wheel and our car was dangerously swerving on the highway at high speed. The car driver behind us was therefore honking. I woke up and slapped our driver and told him to pull over to the curb. I think we came closest to death on that particular night and were saved by shear stroke of providence. I then forced everybody to go to the nearest hotel and sleep and only in the morning we left for our onward journey.

Similarly in Canada when we were approaching Toronto we were passed by a car full of University girls who were probably traveling like us during summer vacation. Alok who was driving wanted to race them. These girls were in a brand new car whereas our old SIMCA was not upto the occasion. In any case Alok must have raced them for 5-10 minutes before we heard a loud noise from our car and it broke down. The accelerator wire had broken. Alok got under the car and fixed it since he seemed to have done it many times before! After this he drove very nicely till the car completely broke down during the last leg of our journey near North Carolina. Alok wanted to sell it to a used-car garage but the garage owner said that he would charge us hundred dollars just to take the car since it was pure junk! In any case after a great amount of haggling we just dumped the car in the garage and took the Greyhound bus back home.

I also saw wonderful natural beauty of American landscape like Niagara Falls, Thousand Islands in New York and great countryside as we drove from Gainesville to Toronto and back. We also spent one week in Washington D.C. visiting Smithsonian Institute, White House, Library of Congress etc. In Washington we stayed with a lovely family of Jim and Estellene Baarda with whom we have still remained in touch.

I was really awed by the gigantic size of the Library of Congress (LOC). The libraries in UF in those times were not really great and so visiting LOC was like seeing a treasure trove. I could not get away from the LOC as there was so much to read. Similarly Smithsonian Institute was something else. This was my first visit to a world class museum and I was really taken aback by the world treasures that I saw there.

Besides the great things, we also saw the ugly side of American cities and way of life. We were in Ann Arbor visiting some of my IITK friends in UM when in the evening we decided to go to Detroit to eat some good Chinese food. In 1975 Ann Arbor, just like Gainesville, did not have a good Chinese restaurant and hence we decided to go to Detroit. Since my friend at UM did not know the address of any good Chinese restaurant we decided to go to downtown and search in yellow pages in one of the hotels. We arrived at Holiday Inn in downtown Detroit around 6:30 p.m. and I went in the lobby to look at the yellow pages for the restaurant. Alok in the meantime went to the rest room. After 5 minutes he came out ashen faced. I could not believe the look on his face. So I immediately asked him what happened.

He said a black man tried to rape him in the bathroom. We immediately left the hotel and headed back to Ann Arbor and ate our dinner in a nearby McDonalds restaurant.

In fact almost all the downtown areas of major cities in US in 1970s were in very bad shape, being full of crime and prostitution. In contrast downtown Toronto was beautiful, clean and fun to walk even late at night. The difference between US and Canadian cities was amazing. We also saw the rundown condition of cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Cleveland. Somehow the southern part of US like Florida seemed much cleaner than the northeastern USA. Nevertheless in late 1980s and 90s there was a dramatic revival of down towns in all major cities of US.

– Continued

September 2, 2007

Government Scholarship | The Preparation | Landing in America 
Campus Life | Brush with Greatness | India Association | Marriage
Looking for Better School? | Exploring America | Graduate Studies
Teaching at UF | Decision to go back to India | Epilogue

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