I’ve noticed that you have made a subtle change to the format for alumni receiving advanced degrees. Previously, it was always at the end of the “Classnotes” section. Now, it is included with news within the person’s class.
As an undergrad, I knew I wanted to attend graduate school. However, my senior year, despite having been accepted at several programs, I decided that I should take a break from academia. This was, in retrospect, a very good decision.
As I got busy with other things, I stopped thinking about graduate school. But I was always a little wistful about it; and you know, there was this whisper in my ear every time I read The Grinnell Magazine.
At first, I saw that the advanced degrees were mostly afforded to people from my class. But if you watched the advanced degrees section as though it were a narrative unfolding, you couldn’t help noticing that even though the majority of the degrees were from the cohort that had recently graduated, one or two random stragglers would come round the bend.
Grinnellians sometimes took nontraditional paths through higher education. Every time I saw that someone who had graduated 10, 20, 30 years earlier was just now finishing their advanced degree, it gave me a little boost of inspiration. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten there; it was that I hadn’t gotten there yet.
I finally received my Ph.D. in May of 2015, 30 years after graduating from Grinnell. And I confess I was a little disappointed that my Classnotes announcement was in the classes section rather than in a separate section. I knew that, like me, most people probably only read the notes from their cohort. I had pridefully hoped that my accomplishment might offer some inspiration, or perhaps just a subtle reminder to another alum who might have put it off that their advanced degree is still out there, waiting for them.