Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1 Spring 2018 | Page 25

“Before the revolution (of December 1989
that overthrew Ceausescu), people would be
assigned jobs. When students were ready to
graduate, companies prepared a list of available
positions. All the universities were connected
and they would call each person by name based
on their final rankings in college. When you
were called you picked the job you wanted
from the list and as they went down the list of
rankings, you had to pick from whatever was
left, and you had to go. To not work was illegal
and you would go to jail.”
Earning her engineer diploma degree in
1991, Sandu worked for a power components
company as a design engineer by day and in the
evenings she worked as a laboratory instructor
with a former professor at the university.
had a strong math/physics background,” Sandu
said. “Until then it didn’t even cross my mind
that a PhD was something you could do while
you were young. All the people I knew with
PhDs were close to retirement because you
needed approval of the communist party or
Ceausescu’s wife to get a PhD so it wasn’t easy
to think about doing that in the late 1980s.”
With the opportunity now available, Sandu
applied to graduate school in the United States
and arrived in Iowa a semester after her hus-
band had arrived. (Adrian Sandu is a professor
of computer science at Virginia Tech).
“I didn’t want to apply somewhere else so I
waited until Adrian was accepted and applied to
the same school,” Sandu explained. “So, on Dec.
18, 1992, I boarded a plane for the first time
ever and flew to Chicago. It was beautiful, just
before Christmas. This was the America we had
seen on TV.
“So a couple years after the revolution people
started hearing about programs where you
could do graduate degrees in different countries
and a lot of big universities were interested in
"Going
to Iowa PAGE
was 25
very different. It was
SPRING 2018
recruiting students from Romania because MOMENTUM
he
a part of America I didn’t know much about,