Ellen Hayes - selections from her essay on electives.
"Compared with Jupiter and Saturn, this is not much of a planet, but it is your own planet. Will you feel quite satisfied to go up and down it for seventy years and remain deaf to the long, long story, blind to the pictured page? You are planning to visit, some day, the Yellowstone and the Alps. However much you may think you enjoy those regions, you will see, but understand not, and your enjoyment will be far less than it might be if you fail to study geology...... Do you think that ability to express yourself in French and German will in any degree make up to you for ignorance of the language of mother earth?
...Recover yourself from the conceit that you are an important person because you are a college graduate. The girl who spends the long day tying up bread and cake in a city grocery probably has as good a mind as you have, - perhaps a better one... You have lived for a while in a uniquely constituted community, all of whose members have sufficient food and wear good clothes, where there is light and warmth, books and music and pictures, - enough and more than enough; where there is exemption from responsibility and from the necessity of initiatve, and where there is freedom from the cares, the sorrows, and the dangers that beset many young women's lives. Depart quietly. The real test of you is yet to come."
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- Finishing up my masters in Tectonic Geomorphology, soon on to a PhD providing all goes well. I have a dog named Finn to adventure with, and a camera, and that's enough.
2 comments:
I'm not gonna lie -- people who talk like this make me want to punch them in the face. Perhaps it's just the lack of context that makes her sound like a smarmy, self-righteous twit -- but it works!
Ah, I suppose a little more context is never a bad thing :P - she was one of the first professors at wellesley (either the first mathematics professor at wellesley, or the first female mathematics professor at wellesley) and even by today's standards, she was incredibly liberal and radical. This excerpt is from an essay on why she doesn't think electives should be part of college curriculums (because they allow people to make their own majors, and that allows for a path of leisure, when college is supposed to be hard, molding your mind for other things).
I don't know if that changes your opinion of her or not, but I like that she talks about geology (hehe) and that she basically says that right now, in college, studies are tough - and they're supposed to be - but it isn't who you are. Don't think that your measure is taken based on how you do in school - real life comes after.
At least, that's what I got out of it : ).
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