Students' stories show diversity
Yvonne Chiu Hays
This year's entering class in the Graduate School includes 59 percent who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents and 41 percent who are international students. Of the domestic graduate students, 18.5 percent are members of minority groups.
Men account for 65 percent of the new graduate student population and women account for 35 percent.
As the numbers illustrate, they are a diverse group and bring with them a variety of experiences that can only be understood in their individual stories. Here is a small sampling:
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Foster |
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"It was the complete antithesis of the work I had done up to then," said the 24-year-old summa cum laude Harvard history graduate. "But I'm not really sorry I did it because I learned what I don't want to do."
Not more than a couple of months into her corporate job, Foster applied to history doctoral programs because she decided she wanted to become a college professor.
She already had a taste of leading a class. Prior to joining The Gap, Foster worked for a year as a high school teacher at the American School of Paris.
At Princeton, Foster intends to study modern Europe. She said she is interested in history from a socio-cultural context. Her senior thesis in college explored the meanings behind the 1931 French Colonial Exposition in Paris. The ideas for that paper about the exploitation of indigenous people grew out of the three summers she spent working on a Montana Indian reservation before and during college.
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Lynch |
Lynch said she didn't know if she could do it. She had finally arrived at a point in her life where she could afford to treat herself to a vacation and help support her mother, who raised Lynch and her brother without support from their father.
In the end, she decided she had to do what she loved--and it wasn't accounting. She wanted to teach.
"Money had to be unimportant. Your choice of career really has to focus on what it is you like," said Lynch, who recently turned 31. She had always intended to go to college. She had obtained her general high school equivalency degree while working her way up from account clerk. She also managed to take five college-level literature courses in the evenings.
When she applied to Hunter College in New York City, the school had an open admissions policy. Even knowing that, Lynch said she cried upon her acceptance.
"Once you brand yourself a failure, it's very hard to let yourself believe you're not," Lynch said.
By her first semester at Hunter, she was hooked on the literature of John Milton. "I just got very interested in the period, the politics--it was all just sitting so subtly in his work. Everything to me now is six degrees of Milton."
When graduation came, Lynch was thinking of graduate school. She had a 4.0 grade point average, but was reluctant to apply to the top English programs because she felt she lacked more prestigious credentials. She only did so on the encouragement of a few Princeton administrators and professors, whom she met through a summer minority research program at the University.
They were right. Not only did she receive a full scholarship from Princeton, she also won two national awards, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for Minorities.
"I feel like I've just been given the gift of life," Lynch said.
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Mayo |
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At college, he strengthened his interest in physics and the search for the fundamental laws of nature.
"My primary interest had been in mathematics," Mayo said, "because it was more accessible at an elementary level than physics was." He majored in both because "if I went into pure math, I would lose some connection with the study of the real physical world," he said.
Mayo never actually skipped a grade. His mother, a psychologist, schooled him at home. Under her supervision, he accelerated from grade 5 to 12 in four years. Mayo said the system worked out well because he could set his own pace and assume more responsibility for his learning. Before his mother took over his curriculum, he attended a public elementary school. Mayo said he was frustrated and bored there.
At home, every aspect of school could not be recreated, but Mayo said they certainly made the effort. Their kitchen became his lab, and his parents enrolled him in community sports and music activities. He also studied math and literature for three summers at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth.
"My parents felt strongly that a home-based education program did not mean social isolation," Mayo said.
At Princeton, the 18-year-old graduate student is interested in studying with the theoretical physics faculty, and contributing to research in string theory and quantum gravity. Mayo said the work could "generate a completely different picture of space and time."
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September 10, 2000 Contents • They've
arrived! • New
look debuts for Bulletin • Many
work 'with one accord' to raise funds for
Princeton • Briefs • Rowers
go for the orange in Sydney • Berry
keynotes two-day event
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