By the numbers

My husband defended his PhD disseration today and it went fabulously. I am very proud. It is official, we are no longer students, and we will never again be students. It's a good feeling. Getting ready this morning went rather smoothly (minus forgetting the parking pass and nearly running out of gas), and it made me realize that this was the 4th defense we've done as a team, so we should be good at them by now. Maybe it's because his talk addressed a lot of statistics about people, or maybe it's because I just had to compile my own stats for a grant proposal, but it's got me thinking about the education demographics of our household and the numbers are in my head.

Average age: 30
Total number of degrees: 7
Total years of post-baccalaureate education: 15
Total years of post-high school education: 24
States in which we've done research: 6
Countries in which we've done research: 2

When I stop and think about it it's pretty atypical. Not in that academic world of course; it is fairly common to find households with two PhD's floating around. But in the general context of life, I think we may be a statistical anomaly.

So what does it all mean? I'm not bragging about our education, I don't think it makes us better then other people or anything like that. It's just what we choose to do with our lives. I am proud of what we have accomplished, but if anything does it really mean?

Some people say that we are afraid of the "real world". That's not it, life doesn't get much more "real" then paying the mortgage on a grad student salary.

Some people say that we must not fit in anywhere else. That's not it, we have many friends and we have both handled jobs outside of the academic world with no problems.

To me, it is two people who love life, love to learn, love to explore, love to teach, and think that they may be able to contribute to the state of science in some way, and therefore the world. It's two people who want to continue to love life, love to learn and explore the world, and it's two people who want to do that together.

So bring on that real world, here's a team ready to face it head on.

( I hope this post isn't too optimistically happy for those of you who have become used to the regular disgruntled academic ramblings. Watching someone defend a dissertation as successfully has hubby did today tends to raise one's spirits about the world)