Stretching Minds, Opening Doors… Losing Identity?

AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST • Summer 2004 Pedaling my pink bicycle back and forth to work each day, I found myself musing about mentors and the graduate school experience. This led naturally to thoughts of the enormous breadth of our discipline, the scholarship it has wrought, and the attrition rate of departments of entomology. Initially, I thought to entitle this essay “Lazing in Lexington,” as the luxury of ruminating on such topics seems to be accessible only when one is enjoying a sabbatical leave, as I am currently doing at the University of Kentucky. The undulating wheat and lentil fields of the Palouse, home to my employer, Washington State University in Pullman, have given way to the rolling hills of the Bluegrass, a region bedecked with manicured horse farms and impeccably constructed stone fences. I am liberated (albeit temporarily) from committee meetings, course instruction, and continuing budget concerns. Once again I am living the life of a graduate student, complete with timeworn furniture, second-hand kitchenware, and a cast-iron bathtub sans shower. Thomas Wolfe wrote that “You can’t go home again,” but my return to a former lifestyle has undoubtedly fueled my retrospective cogitations. How many of us, I wonder, chose our discipline because we came under the tutelage of an inspiring individual? What percent of our collective curiosity became channeled into insect studies as a result of a galvanizing mentor? In her essay “The Biologist/Poet and the Poet/Biologist,” Maura C. Flannery (2001) notes that John Enders abandoned his graduate studies in English literature in favor of a Ph.D. in microbiology after working in the lab of Hans Zinsser, who rekindled Enders’ latent affinity for biology. The world Stretching Minds, Opening Doors... Losing Identity?