Getting to My Academic Goal Without a Roadmap- is this a “guy thing”?

Dr. Gary L. Hannan, Ph.D. 
Professor of Biology
Eastern Michigan University

I feel very fortunate.  I always was fascinated with the biological world from an early age.  I went through my various exploratory phases of collecting this and that, and bringing home collections of living things that my mother tolerated with the sort of resignation that parents are bound to accept.   She cringed at discovering boxes of spiders, jars of tadpoles and other curiosities in my room, in the refrigerator, on the porch, or wherever I had decided to store them. 

My family moved frequently, partly because of my father worked in a variety of capacities: welder, tool and die worker and, before too long, working for construction companies- estimating, preparing bids, managing construction projects.  Building Disneyland in Anaheim was the most interesting to me, being an eight-year-old at the time.  I am still not sure what effects all that moving around had on my schooling, but I never worried about it.

Throughout my schooling, I flowed along with courses that other people had set up for me.  I had no idea about how to convert my “outside” interests into academic realities.  I don’t remember really getting much information about college- when to apply, how to apply, how to prepare for standardized tests, or any of that.  I did take a couple of tests- something about National Merit Scholarships and something about scholastic aptitude.  I didn’t know what they meant, but they were things that high school students did.  How DID people decide where to go to college?  Being in California at a time when states provided the majority of funding for public universities, the public universities cost about $600 per year for fees (there was no tuition), there did not seem to be any reason to look outside the state, so I didn’t.  My family was living on one income- decent income, but with three kids it was important to count pennies and follow a budget.  Santa Barbara was nice; I had lived there as a kid and they had a big biology department.  Why not apply there?  How about a couple other state institutions?  OK.  That was about it as far as my knowledge of the college scene was concerned.  Neither parent, nor my older brother or sister, had gone to college, so I had no idea what to ask, what to expect.

A weekend orientation program on campus was bewildering.  Dorm assignments, selecting courses, choosing a major (what area within the Biology Department?), what are general education requirements?  Why not take biology, chemistry, physics, math and psychology at the same time?  It all sort of fell into place, but I still had no idea where I was headed.

Once I started my classes, I met with an adviser, Dr. William Purves.  He asked some questions about what I wanted to do after I graduated.  Wait a minute!  I’m a freshman.  I think I want to do what I see my professors doing- teaching and doing research.  Well, concluded Dr. Purves, you will want to get a Ph.D., then.  That was the first I had heard of that as part of my future. I had been selected as part of a group of students for whom general education requirements had been waived, so I had little direction on which courses to take.  “Take a year of English courses.  Take a year of calculus.  Take the full-year sequences of physics and organic chemistry.  Take a year of German, or French” were Dr. Purves’ recommendations.  I was off, and running, but I was so busy taking those lab courses that I still had no idea what options were available in biology.

How often it seems to come down to a course, or, more specifically, a person teaching a particular course, that defines a direction.  And so it was with me.  A California Flora course.  A Plant Geography course.  Dr. Haller was cool.  I took another plant class.  Plants are cool.  I took a class from Dr. Dale Smith on plant classification and evolution, and that defined my direction.  He became my academic mentor- the first person who provided me with information about graduate studies, research options, and advice on graduate schools.  His main advice was to go to another university for grad school to get a different perspective, interact with new faculty and grad students.

I applied to UC Santa Barbara (contrary to Dr. Smith’s advice), UC Berkeley (his preference for my graduate studies) and a couple other grad schools.  I did not really realize how risky it was to limit my applications to a small number of schools.  I did visit the Botany Department at UC Berkeley in the spring after I graduated from UCSB to talk with a few of the faculty there.  It must have helped.  Fortunately for me, I was accepted to the Botany Department’s Ph.D. program in the fall, having been granted a teaching assistantship and tuition waiver.  Grad school presented a very different set of challenges, but that’s another story…..