May 22, 1999
James McCarthy

First, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

Second, there's a lot for which I'm very grateful.

- I've had wonderful professors and advisers, who have gone to great lengths to train me as a scholar and a teacher. Getting myself into a lot more than I was bargaining for has turned out to be a very good thing.

- I've been extremely lucky in having a suberb group of fellow graduate students as colleagues and friends in a long and difficult process. They've taught me, challenged me, helped me work through ideas, and been the best friends anyone could ask for.

- Most of all, I'm grateful for the intellectual freedom I've had in my department. I'll say more about that later.

- Also, I think that all graduate students instructors on this campus owe a huge debt to AGSE, the graduate student union, which after years of organizing finally got the administration to admit this year that when we work as instructors and work a certain number of hours, performing specified teaching duties, and get a paycheck, it is, in fact, a job.

2. The third thing I realized in thinking about the start of graduate school was that it was a long time ago. It's a cliche that getting a Ph.D. is like running a marathon: it's an endurance race, not a sprint

3. I think that’s true, and I want to tell you a real marathon story that I think really brings out some of the parallels. My family’s from around Boston, and I have a cousin about my age who got really into running a while back and decided that he was going to run the Boston Marathon.

- Now for those of you who don’t know, the Boston Marathon is a huge public spectacle: over ten thousand people run in it; the course goes right through the busiest parts of the city; they line the course with police barricades; and hundreds of thousands of people line up along the route to watch, give the runners encouragement, hand them cups of water, that kind of thing.

- But of course that only lasts so long. These days someone wins the race within a couple of hours and naturally the excitement starts to fade; it gets hot in the sun; and by midafternoon everyone's pretty much gone home. But a lot of people are still running!

- So this cousin of mine was running his first marathon, and having a really hard time. He was hours behind the main pack. He had developed some kind of horrible knee pain part way through and was limping badly. It was getting to be evening, it was starting to get dark, the crowds were all gone, they had taken down the barricades, and he still had several miles to go. At this point the streets and sidewalks that had been part of the course just had normal traffic on them. But he was still moving forward; in his mind he was still running a marathon! And then as he came around some corner, a little kid about eight years old or so with his mother crossed the street in front of him. And the kid looks at this guy limping along by himself, points right at him, and without even lowering his voice says "Geez, Ma – look at that poor bastard!" And the realization of what he looked like from the outside almost finished my cousin off right there.

- The point being, it's easy to feel exactly like that in the later stages of a PhD program. The crowds and enthusiasm are all there when you’ve just started and you’re still taking classes. Your family probably thinks it’s great that you’re going to get your PhD; you're excited about the new experience, and so forth. But by the time you’re actually writing your dissertation, the crowds are all gone. It seems like you've been doing this forever. A lot of the people you were running with are gone, one way or another. Some zipped ahead without breaking a sweat; others realized that they could be at home on the couch and dropped out. A few have tried to take shortcuts, but that doesn’t work and they get disqualified.

- Often people have gone from being impressed and excited about the PhD program, to wondering why on earth you haven’t finished yet. The academic equivalent of that kid’s comment about my cousin is old friends and family asking you: "So, when are you going to be done again?" or, "How far along is your dissertation?" For those of us in grad school now, our witty friends can even ask us if we’re planning to finish in this millennium.

4. I have two points here. The first is, the people getting their PhDs today are finishing a very peculiar kind of marathon that’s lasted more than six years in most cases. This ceremony is our finish line, so be patient with us if we mumble inchoherently for a little while afterwards.

5. The second -- and I hope you’ll forgive the fairly heavy-handed segue here -- the second is that I think it’s worth asking why people would put themselves and those around them through this process.

6. Now, obviously I can't speak for everyone; people have lots of different reasons for getting a PhD in geography. Some do it for the fame, money, and power, of course -- but they usually wise up and drop out in the first year or so. Some do it because they think it's easier than having a job. They often take a few years to figure out that it's an exceptionally demanding way to procrastinate.

7. But most of the people I've know in grad school really are motivated by a combination of intellectual passion and social idealism.

- The first part of that is selfish. I want to be very clear that I’m not whining here when I talk about it being a long and difficult process: we all enjoy it on some level. Being a grad student really is a good life on the whole; and the intellectual and personal rewards are substantial and unique. It’s a privileged and subsidized existence, and we’re all lucky to be able to take part in it.

8. But the other major motivation for most people I've know in grad school, whether they can always bring themselves to admit it or not, is that they hope that their work can help to make the world just a little bit better place, even if it is in some very narrow and specific way.

- The world in 1999 is an astoundingly complicated place, and getting more so every day: we live in world of constant, incredibly rapid change, in both social and environmental terms. We tolerate massive inequality along axes of class, race, gender, and nationality, among others. We live in a sea of consumer goods that increase constantly in number and variety, and to trace even one of these everyday items back to all of its origins is a mind-boggling project. We're basically running uncontrolled and irreversible experiments on ecosystems at all scales. In almost every respect, we're remaking the world around us at a furious and constantly increasing pace, with nothing resembling a plan and precious little idea what the outcomes will be. For the most part, the very few drive and benefit from these changes, while the many do their best to get on board or get out of the way. Ironically, there's not much new in this: everything I've just said was all just as true a hundred years ago. I for one find this whole dynamic prospect terrifying for the most part, although it certainly has its hopeful aspects at times.

9. By now you're probably thinking: "Oh no, this guy is in full millennial rant mode; what does this have to do with a geography commencement?"

- Simply this: we're generally encouraged to believe that things can't be that much different from the way they are: either the way things are is really for the best, or at least it's as good as it realistically can be. I don't believe that at all, and I think that the best way to counter the training to believe that is by making connections that aren't usually made or aren't widely recognized.

- This can require years or even a lifetime of work, preferably not reinventing the wheel of what people have worked out before -- thus the PhD.

- It also requires being able to integrate a lot of different kinds of approaches and insights: environmental, historical, economic, cultural, and more. And it's been my experience that geography is one of the few academic disciplines where this kind of eclecticism is not just allowed, but actually encouraged. It’s precisely this potential to follow the connections that we see that attracts many of us to the field.

- Geographers work on almost the full range of issues in the contemporary social and environmental sciences. In our department, we have people doing research all over the world, on everything from bitter environmental conflicts to cutting-edge work in environmental restoration; from war and reconciliation in specific locations to the growth of powerful global instititutions; and from prehistoric climates and agriculture to the growth of today's most dynamic industries and regions.

10. This range of work can of course lead to some debates within the field: there’s a lot out there that needs doing and studying, and resources are always limited.

11. But it also points to what I have found to be the best thing about my department and my discipline. When I was choosing where to go to grad school, and in what field, someone who was finishing up his PhD in this department at the time told me that if I came here, as long as I was excited about what I was doing and was making clear progress with it, no one would ever rein me in and tell me "Oh, you can't do that here, that's not geography." That's turned out to be true. I'm extremely grateful for that, and I'm looking forward to telling my own students the same thing.

Thank you.

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