Failure?

A Masters degree in Biostatistics from Harvard at age 22. How can that even be considered failure?

One of the really outstanding students I have mentored here at the lab e-mailed me today with such a somber voice that failure is the only word to put with her attitude and voice. She e-mailed me asking if she could use me as a reference in her job search as her plans for a Ph.D. from Harvard in Biostatistics “didn’t work out”. Disappointed? Only in the fact that she defended her Masters in June and didn’t even tell me so that I could send her a congratulations on your graduation card as well as a token graduation gift.

My goodness. If this is failure, what have we come to? I e-mailed her back with a hearty congratulations on her Masters and did my best to impart to her what a wonderful achievement she has in getting this degree. It made me sad for her, because I know her well enough to know that it is a huge blow to her ego to have to admit that she stopped short of her Ph.D. I knew there were difficulties from the get go in her program. She talked with me frequently about them during her first year, about the cut-throat nature of her colleagues, the unavailable nature of her professors. After her first year she was considering quitting. I believe it was me and one of the managers here at the lab who convinced her to plod forward, that it was just the first year crappola that she was encountering.

Even at my very small state school I had my fair share of that the first year. On the contrary though, I look back and realize that I was often the one dishing it out that first year. (Hanging head in shame.) But the recipients were so deserving. I mean if you can’t hack it during year one at a school that TRIES to keep its enrollment up, take a hint. (Is that justification?) Take the girl who was a year ahead of me who could not explain to her students how to derive the Ideal Gas Law. (She did graduate and is teaching math at a small community college in California.) Or the 57 year old woman who… oh goodness, I don’t even know where to start with her. When you raise your hand 3 months into Advanced Inorganic Chemistry and say, “wait, I thought a salt was NaCl?” There is a problem.

These aren’t the students that are at Harvard. C was valedictorian, graduated two years early from high school and then graduated ivy league at the top of her class in physics. The girl is amazing.

I think back to when C was selecting grad schools to apply to. Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Stanford, etc. Then she put University of Washington as her back up. She, not surprisingly, got into them all. But what shocked me was that in talking to her, UW had wormed its way into her top list and I remember her saying she kind of wanted to go there. But we all told C, you *have* to go to one of the others. You will forever kick yourself for not going! Just think of the opportunities when you finish with your Ph.D.! I wonder if we all pushed her too hard. If in her own mind, she didn’t know better what would be a good fit. And it was her fear of disappointment towards everyone else that pushed her to Harvard. I feel a twinge of guilt.

I sit here with my Ph.D. from a lower end state school. It was a safe bet. I was a decent college student who took a safe bet and went to a school that aimed to retain its students. Then I look at C with a foul taste in her mouth from her grad experience and her Masters from a school known for its competitiveness and I think how unfair. Because wow, she is so smart. And in my own mind, I look at this and can’t help but think how stupid they were to let her go.