Alex Petkas Update -- 24 March 2010

24 March 2010

TO: Friends and family

Alex (with wife Emily) has spent a year in Philadelphia in a post Baccalaureate program in Classics at Penn. He finished one semester at St. Vladimir's Orthodox seminary then returned to Houston for what would have been a year and a half non-academic "sabbatical."  He learned about this program just in time to get into it last fall, so his sabbatical was mercifully cut short.  Penn is one of several places on the planet that has a classics faculty -- we are talking Greek and Latin -- with special strengths in 2nd & 3rd Century AD and early Byzantine literature, Alex's areas of interest. 

Needless to say, he did extremely well, impressed the faculty, and recently received rather generous offers to join the PhD programs at Penn, Princeton, and the University of California at Berkeley, the latter two also having special strengths in his areas of interest. Though he loves Penn and was much more impressed with Berkeley than he expected, when they flew him west for a rather intensive meet and greet, he made his choice official today by notifying Princeton of his acceptance of their offer.  All three offered what amounted to 5 or 6 years of tuition waivers plus a generous stipend and summer subsidies.  For us this means that Alex will be (at least officially) off our payroll while he works on his PhD and for him it will mean he will be more or less free of debt at the end. And for Emily it means she will be able to work somewhere else than Starbucks and, at some point along the way, go to law school.

To say that Martha and I – and Belle too – are proud of him would be an understatement, especially given his on-line gaming detour (and resulting academic stumble) during the first couple of years of high school.  Emily has done quite well on her first run at the LSAT – well within the range of students at top law schools -- and hopes to do even better next time

Alex can be reached at alex@petkas.com or apetkas@gmail.com or on his cell at 713-2031529. Emily can be reached at emily@petkas.com or emilybower6@gmail.com or on her cell at 281-610-0657.