That Goodbye Time of Year

The end of the academic year is upon us at Stanford, and so we are saying goodbye to some of our community. Yesterday, our undergraduate research assistant said goodbye till 2008 - she is off on an exciting, and much sought after, fieldwork program. We hope she'll be back at the Institute in the future, with a whole load of new skills and great stories.

Today, we had a special lunch to say goodbye to this year's Graduate Dissertation Fellows. We usually have seven "GDFs", but this year we had 10, through the generosity of Adina Paytan. Adina is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, but will also be leaving Stanford this Summer. We will be sorry to see her go, as she has been a strong supporter of the Clayman Institute, and is very active in pursuit of equal treatment for women in the STEM fields. (That's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, for those uninitiated to the jargon.) Adina had some spare money to use on student activities and she decided that the best use for it was to support more young scholars. We could only agree, and we were delighted that she gave the money to our GDF program.

Each year, we give each GDF a stipend of $3,000, and they benefit from monthly meetings where they can share work in an interdisciplinary setting and, perhaps even more importantly, in a safe space where they can ask all kinds of questions and show their ignorance about different fields of research in the knowledge that no one will laugh at them or think less of them. (Needless to say, as their facilitator, I model this behavior for them, as I rarely know anything about anything they are talking about.... And they all know so much!) We really wish we could give our GDFs a larger stipend. I've been looking at other fellowships around Stanford, and find that they go up as high as $30,000 in some cases - with tuition fees paid - and with office space. Wow. We've got some way to go..... Luckily graduate students apply for our fellowship program because of its prestige, and not for the money.

Our GDFs are working on some incredible research, from Mukta Sharangpani's study of violence of all kinds against women in India, to Brooke Ricalde's consideration of the relationship between human capital, social capital, financial capital and gender in Peru's small business sector, and Michelle Zamora's examination of female knowledge and leadership in Mexica tradition and culture. They shared some powerful work at our informal meetings during the course of the year and I, for one, am much better educated as a result! I think Mukta's chilling descriptions of methods of infanticide may live with me forever.

Each year, the GDF group leaves me with at least one highly memorable fact or theory that I just have to share with others. I have to say that my favorite so far is Tiffany Romain's description of the annual "Frozen Dead Guy" festival in the town of Nederland, Colorado. Tiffany was studying cyrogenics and the practice of freezing eggs and embyros for reproductive use, but this story about the town that is proud to acknowledge the frozen man kept in a local shed just took the blue ribbon. (And it's really true - see http://www.legendsofamerica.com/CP-FrozenDeadGuy.html for the story of Grandpa Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989 and has been frozen ever since. If you want to find out about the festival, visit http://www.nederlandchamber.org/FrozenDeadGuyDays/index.html.)

OK, I digress. I just love that story, I've told it lots of times. People find it so hard to believe.

I'm really thrilled to say that four of this year's GDFs are leaving Stanford for full-time employment: Kjersten Whittington moves to Reed College as an Assistant Prof in Sociology; Sapna Cheryan becomes an Assistant Prof at the University of Washington in Seattle; Nikki Slovak will be teaching at Santa Rosa Community College; and Brooke Ricalde will be our ambassador for gender analysis at McKinsey, the management consultancy. Jessica Payette, Karen Rapp, Kari Zimmerman, Michelle Zamora, Mukta Sharangpani, and Lalaie Ameeriar will be continuing their studies at Stanford. You can read more about their work on our website at http://www.stanford.edu/group/gender/FundingOpportunities/GradDissertCurrentFellows.html.

We have loved having all of them at the Institute this year.