I began graduate school on August 16th, 2001. After a year of rotations, I joined Daryl Kipke's Neural Engineering Lab at the University of Michigan, and six years later, I graduated with my PhD. In total, from the time I began graduate school to the time I "completed all requirements," was seven years. Exactly seven years. As in I turned everything into the Rackham graduate school on August 15th, 2008. Why did it take so long? Now that is a long conversation my friend.
On my first day of graduate school, I woke up in Ann Arbor in my new apartment, had a cup of coffee, and walked the 2.5 miles to the Krause Natural Sciences Building on central campus to attend the "boot camp" for neuroscience students where we learned basic techniques in neurobiology. I remember being a bit tired that day because I had stayed up late the previous night writing songs with my roommate Eric. I was single at the time, not tied down to much of anything, and unknowing what the future held. The out of focus* photograph below shows that first morning.
Seven years later to the day, on August 15th, 2008, I got up in the morning, went to Expresso Royale for a cup of coffee spiked with a shot of expresso (graduate school having increased my tolerance for caffeine), then biked the 1.5 miles to my lab in the Lurie Biomedical Engineering Building on North Campus. I grabbed the last two dissertation forms from my advisor, printed out a revised table of contents, and then biked from north campus to central campus to pay a $70 binder's fee to the University of Michigan. I then turned all the final paperwork in to the administrative staff at Rackham graduate school. The last person between me and my PhD told me she really liked the dedication to my grandfather at the beginning of my dissertation and the Henry David Thoreau quote at the end of my dissertation (it's funny as I think she is the only one who noticed those two things...none of my faculty advisors commented on them). She then printed out a "fulfilled all requirements" paper for me, and told me I was done.
That was that. I wanted to hug her. Happiness. I stood there awkwardly for a few minutes overcome with emotion, and she rightly noticed it and shook my hand saying "Congratulations." I walked out of that building in the early afternoon and the day had never looked so beautiful. I had to go back to lab to help a labmate with a experiment, and here you can see me on my last day of graduate school looking over a surgical prep.
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Then, the day after graduate school, I found myself a victim of eternal recurrence, sitting in a high school classroom.
Would I do it all over again? I am happy having studied and continuing to study neuroscience, but I probably would have taken more engineering classes in undergrad. It would have made graduate school a helluva lot easier given the nature of my dissertation. The only "what if?" on my mind is whether I should have gotten a materials science or aeronautical engineering degree instead. Would I be, to phrase Maslow's hierarchy of needs, more "self-actualized?" I imagine everybody has such thoughts. Scaled Composites is hiring....sometimes late at night I playfully let my mind wander, and I imagine just hopping in my car, driving out to California, and knocking on their door.
*****Fin*****
*Note: The out of focus picture of my first day of graduate school above was taken with a Kodak DC4800 3.1 MB digital camera (the out of focus is my fault). In 2001 consumer digital cameras were still very novel, and I was the only one of my friends and colleagues who had one. I had received it as a graduation gift from my parents for my B.S. in Biochemistry. It was a decent camera, but at the time it was about $500-$700. Nowadays a camera of similar features and quality would probably sell at the drug store for $50.
4 comments:
Great story! I hadn't even graduated from undergrad in 2001 and you were starting your PhD. That means you were in MI during the Wolrd Trade Center attack?
So what was the quote at the end of the dissertation?
It's kinda neat how your certificate looks like it was typed on a typewriter.
Yes, I was in Ann Arbor during 9/11. I left school early and Eric and I wrote a bunch of songs about it deep in into the night:
"The Ballad of Todd Beamer"
"No Metal Birds in the Sky Today"
"Oh, Taliban"
The premise of "No Metal Birds in the Sky Today" is that United flight 93 passed over Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it turned around.
I still listen to them occasionally. They are pretty good if a bit low on production values.
My dissertation can be viewed at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~tmarzull/BigD.pdf
but here is the end of my dissertation
......
As a final dalliance, in my experimental endeavors I often recollected the following passage from the final chapter of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden."
"There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it
came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, "It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life." He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it
should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a
distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful? "
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