We woke up early on Tuesday morning to make the 4 hour drive from Oklahoma City to Fayetteville.  The drive was fairly uneventful; the most interesting thing was passing trough Ozark National Forest, which is just outside Fayetteville.  Upon entering Fayetteville, I was not very impressed with the cleanliness or tidiness of the homes.  There were some nice neighborhoods, but I imagine we just saw the poorer properties because they were right next to a main road.  The town is not that large, just about 70,000 people.

It was fairly easy to find the University and meet up with the professor who extended the assistantship offers to us, Dr. Jason Tullis.  After meeting, we toured the building that the Department of Geosciences is housed, Ozark Hall.  It’s a good thing that building is scheduled for major renovations next year because it doesn’t look like it has had any modifications since the 1950′s.  I wasn’t planning on spending any time in that building if I went, so that won’t affect me if I go.  Next we walked down to the 3 year old JB Hunt building which houses the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST).  This is the building where I would work on research and take most of my classes.  It was a super nice facility.  We met up with the director of CAST, Dr. Jackson Cothren, and both he and Dr. Tullis briefed us on the center, it’s future direction, and how we can best prepare to be successful graduate students there.  Both Sean and I were greatly impressed with their approachability and genuineness.  One of the neat things they showed us was the “bullpen”, or a room full of nice desks separated by 4 foot tall partitions.  This is where all the graduate students are given their own designated workspace.  There will definitely be perks to being a grad student as opposed to an undergrad.  After we toured that building we were treated to lunch at a local grilled cheese restaurant.  Sound odd?  I though so too until I saw the menu.  In my book, there are enough variations on the grilled cheese sandwich paired with soup or salad to warrant the existence of such a restaurant.  The main benefit of the visit was to get to know the professors that we would be working for.  I think I am comfortable with both of them now and the perk of getting to know the University did not hurt.

After we were done at the school, Sean had orders from his wife to check out an apartment complex in the area.  It was just about a 10 minute drive from campus (with no traffic).  The apartments were nice, but the one bedroom version was pricey for me, a guy who has stuck with really low-rent apartments for the past year.  When I say pricey, I mean compared to sharing utilities and having 4 roommates which drops the rent to $250.  There the rent was $500, not including utilities.  It will be interesting trying to find a balance between nice/comfortable and affordable on a student’s budget.  I definitely don’t want to end up in the wrong neighborhood either.

We headed back to Oklahoma City after that.  Once again, the 4 hour drive was not a problem and I noticed that the Arkansas portion of the drive was more scenic than the Oklahoma part.  We arrived back at Sean’s brother’s house around 10 pm and went to bed.  We had to be up and ready to leave the house by 3 am to make our 6 am flight which we had standby tickets for.  I was glad for the trip and was ready to get home to Provo, but little did I know, that was just the beginning of the trip.