At the end of the year there is much to celebrate beyond academic achievements

By Megan Pickett

Megan is a former NASA scientist and a professor of physics at Lawrence University

There is a rhythm to life in Academia that I find comforting, having lived it my entire life, either through my father or my direct experience.  On campus, the banners and flowers have appeared, and soon enough chairs and staging for Sunday.  We'll celebrate then our graduating class with their families, and too soon: the campus will shift quickly and magically into our peaceful summer.

We should celebrate the major accomplishments and heights our students, soon to be alums, have reached.  Beyond the honors and awards and achievements rightly laureled, I would ask that you lift up, equally, all the quiet victories that happen, every year, on this campus – indeed, on every campus.

There were the three students in a class this year who nearly failed, but who worked – despite early challenges – mightily and ceaselessly to turn everything around.  You won't hear the C or C+ lauded often, but I am here to tell you that sometimes that grade is harder fought and more meaningful than an A.  There was the student who never failed to appear at office hours, always apologizing but never ever needing to. The student who wanted to discuss philosophy and was engaged whatever the grade was. Students in London, none of them physics majors, who each expressed joy at some moment: sunset at Stonehenge, standing across the Prime Meridian, seeing the Rosetta Stone, touching the wood left from the oldest pier from Londinium. 

There are the students I often see in my classes who don't think they can do math or physics because they've been told they can't – by former teachers, by society, by themselves. I've seen the joy of someone learning something they had thought was forever outside their grasp. These aren't small things. 

There were students terrified to say anything in class who managed to ask one question at last, before the class was over. I saw your smile, and I know what courage it took. There were students who, unasked, saw others and helped them: helped with coursework, with being there, with admitting they were lost sometimes, too, even though they always seemed to get things so easily.

And then I think of the students who struggled, as I did, with being away from home, or trying to find their people.  Some did in the end; others didn't and yet made it across the line anyway.  Some fought invisible battles no one will know about or appreciate even if they did. Some wanted to participate in the fullness of college life but couldn't or weren't allowed.  And they found their through line, anyway. 

I know these things because I see them every year, perhaps more acutely this year.  I know them, too, because I was the student who struggled and felt achievement with a C+, who asked one question and felt like it was a valedictory, who fought battles no one would ever know about.  For those students, for most of our students, getting through those four years deserves an award and recognition.  And, yes, the diploma is one such distinction.  That's a lot, and yet, not enough.

For years now, I've worn a Star Trek insignia on my regalia. I don't do it to cheapen the event, or even to say something about a television show that shaped me. I do it, honestly, because I won no honors as an undergraduate myself.  No Dean's List, and certainly no PBK.  No pin or award or recognition for me, except the amazement I felt for the accomplishment of getting through those four years, out the other side, alive and whole. 

So lift your glass for our students this week and on Sunday.  I am proud of all of you, but I doff my tam especially for everyone whose triumphs show your character: pins, letters, laurels – or their absence – notwithstanding.