Thesis Generations
Thesis Generations
By Ken Alder
It was my honor and delight to serve this year as the faculty convener of the senior honors thesis seminar, which I hadn’t taught in more than 25 years. I offered the course three times in the 1990s: in 1995-96 for 16 students, in 1996-97 for 17 students, and in 1998-99 for 8 students. I loved it this year as much as I did then, mainly because I learned so much from the students -- not just about their topics, but about them, and the connections between the two.
After such a long hiatus, though, I wondered about the fate of those 41 students from the 90s, who are old enough to be the parents of the 11 students who wrote theses this year. My students were curious too, as might be (or so I supposed) the readers of this illustrious newsletter.
What is the relationship between former students’ theses and the lives which ensued? I did a little historical research and tracked down the careers of all but 1 or 2 of the 41 former students. I made direct contact with more than half.
I can report that a slim plurality (12) went to law school. The lawyers became general counsels for big tech, finance, and pharma firms (think Nvidia, BitGo, Calamos, and Melissa (née Dulac) Yoon at Ionis Pharma); senior litigators at big law firms (think Kirkland) and boutique firms (Nicki Bazer, who has played an important role negotiating for public schools in Chicago); and individual practioners in bankruptcy, taxes, and employment. Several work in public interest law -- for civil/tenant rights or for international NGOs devoted to religious liberty.
The next largest group (11) went into education. More than I would have guessed ended up as professors of history (or in adjacent fields): Trent Maxie at Amherst, Nicole (née Herz) Hudgins at University of Baltimore, Albert Park at Claremont, Anatoly Pinksy at Helsinki, Doug Kanter at Florida Atlantic, Michael Conway at Otani (Japan), and Dan Magaziner at Yale. There is also one high school history teacher, Marty Bach; a historian for the US military; and Andrea Gregg, who got a learning/design PhD and works in the mechanical engineering department at Penn State.
The next largest group (10) work in a capacious category I’ll call “management,” which encompasses business, consulting, and philanthropy. They range from senior managers at big tech and big health (including Alaina Bookstein at Amazon), to Silicon Valley start-ups, to running their own consulting firms (such as Michelle née Zenner Kohler). Others work in philanthropy (think Red Cross) or run a small business. As for the rest, 3 went into medicine: immunology, hematology, and clinical psychology. Only 1 is in media (Jeff Cohen is the local news chief at WBUR), and 2 work for the government: 1 as an intelligence analyst and 1 as a legislative policy analyst. Finally, a couple devoted themselves primarily to being family caregivers (which isn’t to say the others haven’t!), or were too hard to track down without getting weird about it.
Among the professors, links between their undergraduate thesis and their career paths are often clear. For others, though, their varied life experiences reveal significant if slightly more submerged connections.
Amy Lyons, a Bienen-trained flutist who runs a music studio, taught high school history for 7 years; she wrote her thesis on the history of Chicago school teachers. Michael Conway, a faculty member at Otani University in Japan, is a Buddhist monk; he wrote about ideology in pre-war Japan. Barbara Galligan, a hematologist at UC-Davis, studied Irish literature at Trinity before beginning medical school at 30; her thesis was on Yeats. Katherine Bar, an immunologist at Penn, did her senior thesis on HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Schatzi Throckmorton, who owns/manages a winery in Napa, collaborated with a classmate on a documentary film about the Rwanda genocide; her thesis was on the role of the South African Communist Party in ending apartheid. Lisa Gezelter, a policy analyst on K-12 education for the Oregon legislature, wrote a thesis on Native American Boarding Schools.
Looking back, I remember these students (and the others!) surprisingly well, especially having refreshed my memory by re-reading my letters of evaluation. And each and every one of them (now pushing 50 years of age) says they remember their thesis experience vividly and credit it with teaching them how to rise to the challenge of making sense of the world.
These theses from the 90s were written in the brief window after email and before Google, when library catalogues were starting to go online, but there was no social media or digitalization of sources. The theses students wrote then were superb pieces of work, based on patient digging through recalcitrant evidence. In that respect they are similar to the theses written this year, which we will one day say were composed by students educated in the era before AI.
To a fascinating degree, the process of assembling an argument hasn’t changed, despite the information revolution. Almost all of this year’s students used archives. Most importantly, what persists is the quirky individuality of how they came to their topic. They seemed to me to be just as curious and passionate and hard-working as the students of a generation ago. I know they too will remember this process vividly, and be able to point to it as providing skills for navigating a challenging world. As for what this process will look like in 25 years, that is a harder question.
History is not a predictive discipline; it is retrodictive, meaning it predicts the past. When the Sumerians imagined the passage of time, they did not, as we do, picture themselves striding forward into the future. Instead, they thought of themselves as facing the past and walking backwards into the future. Odd as it seems, that might be a better metaphor for the historical profession. Only occasionally, when the light catches an especially shiny object, do we think we see the future reflected.