Our friend Francois, a professor at NCSU told us that if Kelly got a degree in Statistics then went on to something in the Humanities or Business, she would be the “queen of the department” wherever she went. We thought that was pretty cool at the time, but had not thought about it much since then. Kelly got accepted into a great PhD program and then struggled. On average, everyone else in the program was eight years older than her, the youngest being three years older than her when they started. Almost all of them had an MBA and three to five years of experience before they entered the PhD program. There were a couple who went straight from their undergraduate degree to the PhD program, but had a fairly extensive undergraduate research experience. Kelly, on the other hand, was literally, just two years out of high school, or at least that was how old she was when she started.
She has struggled because she was in the habit of taking hard classes that would help her in her understanding of Statistics and not the general Business leveling classes. She has done great in her TA’ing duties and her classes. She knew (knows) how to deal with hard technical material and with people. She started slowly on her RA’ing tasks, but know that she knows what is expected, she excels. The challenge was the research. She had no background at all in formal, technical research. She has struggled. She has her first formal, publication quality paper due in the second week of February. Her work habits were really pretty good by the end of her undergraduate degree at NCSU, but no where near the level she needed to operate at the PhD level. She has hammered away at it though, and today she is performing at a higher level than she ever might have thought she was capable.
So the payback is that her roommate who is in precisely the same program as Kelly, but seven years older with a PhD professor (Dean, actually) father, is coming to Kelly for help on the truly hard stuff. It is a sweet thing, when you have done the truly hard stuff, to enjoy the benefits and security of having it behind you. Congratulations to Kelly. You can not beat a hard STEM degree, no matter what you go on to do after.
Betty Blonde #470 – 04/29/2010
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