Lorena picked Christian up at the train station yesterday. He had gone up to Seattle to visit Kelly for the Fourth of July weekend. The kids have now been paying their own way and living on their own for a year. I think the transition has been harder for Lorena and I than for the kids. It is also interesting to see them create lives separate from each other. The demographics of the people with whom the associate are completely different.
The funny deal is that, even though Kelly is older than Christian, the difference in age between Kelly and the people in her graduate program is quite a bit greater than the difference in age between Christian and the people with whom he works in his research lab. PhD Marketing students tend to start with a Bachelors degree in Business, then go out and get 3-5 years experience followed by an MBA before they apply to PhD programs. That puts most of the ones starting the program close to age 30. The difference in age between them and Kelly is generally around ten years.
Christian works in an important lab where the professor advises both graduate and undergraduate students. With a few exceptions, the graduate students have gone straight from their undergraduate degree to start a Masters or PhD at around age 23 or 24. The undergraduate students tend to be juniors and seniors so they are usually at least 20 or 21. If Christian had taken the normal trajectory, the upcoming year would be his sophomore year as an undergraduate, so he is only one or two years younger than the undergraduate students and four to six years younger than the graduate students.
When Kelly studied Statistics and Christian studied Math and they all knew the same kids at school, their social situations were pretty similar. Now, with Kelly in a Business program and Christian in an Engineering program at schools over a thousand miles apart, their social situations are very different from each other and they are very much on their own. We never thought about it at the time, but the fact that they would lose both the infrastructure of living at home with Dad and Mom and going to school with each other every day magnified their changes.
We have been very pleasantly surprised that this has been a very positive change for both of them. Of course their are hiccups, but they both do well and enjoyed the chance to get together for a long weekend. Still, they were glad to get back to their own lives when it was over.
Betty Blonde #363 – 12/07/2009
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