The alumni newsletter just came in! Great.

I just finished filling out an online survey for a Prestigious Graduate School Fellowship I once received, back when I was in Astronomy (about 1500 years ago). It dropped me right smack down in the middle of all the mixed (okay, mostly bad, actually) emotions I had every time I got my yearly "What kind of cancer have you cured this year?" call from the head of a different Pretigious Graduate School Fellowship program. Let's say that I started off my university life as a pretty prestigious kind of student. I studies physics and math and astronomy and I did really well in homeworks and exams. I did research projects and went to conferences and even taught some lectures as an undergrad. I got into all the grad schools I applied for, and I didn't set the bar low. 

And at the end of 9 years in astronomy grad school, I quit. Dejected, depressed, no publications to my name, very little belief in myself. Single. Childless. (Although, I was going to be married soon, which was one of the very few points of light in my days back then). But every year since I'd spent a year at Cambridge, I'd get a call to see what glorious accomplishments I'd racked up. My fellow Fellows had gotten early tenure and professorships, some at Harvard or Princeton. They had research groups and I had a cat with kidney failure that I treated with subcutaneous fluids each day, I small house my mom had been smart enough to encourage me to buy in super-cheap Tucson, and a surprising hidden talent as a swing dance teacher.  These yearly calls made me feel so low, so unaccomplished. 

And let's face it, the alumni updates from, well pretty much anywhere I had attended, were depressing. So, in honor of not having started crying filling out this online survey just now while marking "extremely poor" on a number of aspect of my grad experience, I've decided to put up my own alumni update. 

Or rather, two of them. Because, in the intervening years I've learned that everyone has their pain and failures, even the early tenure at Harvard folks, and that some are just better at masking it, or have it in more private aspects of their life.

Almuni update that makes me feel good about myself

 

"A" received both an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a Churchill Scholarship after graduating with a 4.0 GPA in Astronomy and Physics. She went on to get master's degrees in astronomy from both Cambridge University and the University of Arizona. While completing a PhD in science education, she was asked to talk about her research on the culture of communication in academia at locations as varied as IBM and Harvard, and internationally. She and her husband, daughter and beloved dog currently live in Zurich, Switzerland, where she works part time in academia and concentrates the rest of her time on raising her daughter in Lithuanian (her parent's first language), English and Swiss German. They have been enjoying traveling across Europe especially this summer - to Rhodes, Amsterdam, Torino, Istanbul and Stockholm. Also, she has recently decided just to love her 6 foot tall frame as it is and give up on worrying about fashion trends, instead following her creative instincts.

But really, wouldn't we all prefer the kind of alumni update that made the rest of us feel better about ourselves?

Alumni update that should make you feel better about yourself.

"A" did really well in college, on paper,  and managed to come away with a fairly bad grasp of physics. She rode the good GPA wave to a few fellowships, but wound up not publishing anything she felt she had made an intellectual contribution to in her 9 years as an astronomy graduate student. And as for the papers she made no intellectual contribution to, there was one. She spent many days, after her coursework was done, not getting anywhere in her research, and at least half of those not having the heart to even try. She developed a great eye for vintage clothing and jewelry that she managed to sell for a spell on eBay. She felt she slipped farther behind her peers, until she realized she was clinically depressed and quit her program. After picking a research topic in education that she had no topic-specific mentors for,  she defended her dissertation and left Tucson. Her husband got a job in Switzerland where part of the stipulation was that she get a part time, temporary job. The birth of her daughter ended in an unplanned C-section and her daughter woke up 12 times a night for 6 months. "A" was in a hopsital for a month, returned to antidepressants, and used daycare and a babysitter to help her survive the first 1.5 years of her daughter's life, even though she wasn't back to  work. She's been through a lot of counseling in the last 8 years. Recently, she had a miscarriage, so to try to make the best of not being pregnant or getting pregnant again for a while, she convinced her family to go on too many trips across Europe this summer. In between trips, she was often in bed and unable to even use a laptop, due to a ruptured disc in her lower back. And somehow strangely connected to this disc, she can no longer wear jeans or any other slim fitting pants.