DAY four and the vertex, the pointy end of the trip is upon us. Drove for about an hour to Stanford University, one of the largest and most prestigious universities on the west coast.
We spent our first hour there in a seminar with George Foster: an incredibly successful Professor of Business Management.
It was just in time too, considering he was flying to Australia in the afternoon to attend the Brownlow or as he called it ''a dinner''.
George spoke to us about the importance of contacts. That is, interpersonal relations with mutual benefit, and their necessity in order for one to achieve success both in business and life in general.
He also spoke on the fleeting nature of opportunity and the need to grab them when they arise, and about being a doer, rather than a critic or questioner.
All this was flecked with dozens of famous names and acquaintances; the proof is in the pudding, and George Foster is a very successful pudding.
We then received a detailed tour of Stanford, or rather, as detailed as possible in the timeframe.
The place is ludicrous. Fifteen thousand students attend the school and it is pretty much a self-sustainable town unto itself.
The football stadium, next to the athletics track and three 50m swimming pools, would rival Skilled Stadium, matching it in size and obliterating it in quality of infrastructure.
The non-denominational church was incredible. A tribute to Leland Stanford from his wife, it is an absolutely majestic piece of architecture, its walls swathed in what was once the world’s largest mural and an organ with about 8000 pipes, which we were lucky enough to hear being tuned.
I think we were all literally speechless upon leaving, having lost ourselves completely for fifteen minutes in something that was just so much more potent and spiritual and beautiful than anything I had ever seen before.
Thoroughly stunned, and filled to the brim with idealisms, we said goodbye to Laura Peile, our guide and ex-collegian, who must be credited as the driving force behind this trip, and for whose toil for our sake we will be grateful to for a long time.
We then went to SLAC: the Stanford Linear Accelerator, which is basically a smaller and older and simpler version of the LHC, the so-called apocalyptic machine that was supposed to eat the world a few months back.
Credit to Michael Christoe for this one, whose interest and passion for physics inspired him to basically organise in full a tour of something that hadn’t been toured for eight months.
It is fair to say that few of us shared Michael’s passion, but out guide Keith made the science accessible and we were all able to ask questions and really get into it, making for a really fascinating experience.
I took a lot out of today, from a new interest in particle physics, to a secret knowledge of a whole new educational world, and to the importance of always actively grabbing opportunities that float on past us as we move through life, of seizing the day. Carpe Diem.
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