“On Insects and PhDs”

I am a woman with insects on my mind. Each time I sat down to collect my thoughts for today, invariably I would start thinking about insects instead. For those of you in the audience who don’t know me, the connection between the PhD and insects may not be immediately clear, but for anyone who has stopped by my bench lately and seen the collection of flies, caterpillars and beetles currently residing there, this may be less of a surprise. Insects are all I have been thinking about lately, and consequently, one evening I developed a very nice story comparing the journey toward a PhD to the process of metamorphosis undergone by lepedopteran insects. You can all relax. I suspect few share my current passion for insects, and I will keep this insight to myself.

While I may be the only person in the room today who can’t stop thinking about insects, replace the word insect with “your thesis title” and maybe I am no longer in such a small minority. Somewhere along the road, what begins as interest and curiosity, becomes much more. Suddenly, everything reminds us of our thesis because, as our friends and families can attest, we are always thinking about our thesis. Even our dreams are peppered with strange allusions to our thesis work. I for one can tell you that giant talking Drosophila are quite intimidating, even when they wear lab coats.

We start graduate school with unbounded optimism. I was going to cure cancer and complete my thesis in 3 and 1/2 years. Of course curiosity and optimism can only get us so far; and by year five, it was quite clear my goals had to be reevaluated. There are days during a PhD when the sense of failure is acute, when we post our resumes on Monster.com and fantasize about long trips to Tahiti from which we never return.

In my opinion, one of the most challenging aspects of the PhD is the fact that, while Tahiti may not be a viable option, we really can quit any time we like. I congratulate everyone here today for sticking it out. So why did we stay? We stayed because even in the most difficult times, ultimately we wanted to. We stayed because we couldn’t leave without trying our absolute hardest, because we were part of a greater community of friends, family and colleagues who reminded us of our own abilities and most importantly because we had passion for our work.

Although we graduate students enjoy playing the martyr card, I’m going to let the rest of you in on a secret. For all the bad days, there were very good days too. Days when we could barely contain our excitement, when we feasted on vending machine snacks for dinner so we could keep working late into the night, when we found ourselves in the Bronx or South Ferry so engrossed in our subway reading that we forgot to get off the train, and when we came to realize that we could contribute significantly to the world around us, even if we didn’t cure cancer.

To have a passion in life is a blessing, to have the means to indulge that passion a privilege. One of the most rewarding parts of graduate school is finding a community of people who share our passions and who are not only interested in what we have to say but are willing to nurture us and challenge us to go farther. To our mentors, to our peers, we thank you; the Columbia community is a far greater resource than any book or journal could ever be.

Today the theses are finished, the dissertation defenses behind us, but I suspect that passion lingers. May the passions developed here be a driving force for each of us in the years ahead.