My letter to Karen in which I commented on my first days at Cornell was unique in that I usually wrote “romantic” letters to her, with a focus on my feelings for her and our future, rather than comments about what was routinely going on in my life in graduate school. There were, however, a few snippets which allude to that life and serve as stimuli for recollections of those days, some six decades later.
Originally Karen was to visit Cornell for “Fall Weekend,” but the event was cancelled. My letter of September 25 to her indicates the reason. “Due to the death of a student last year during Spring Weekend, the admin. is against a Fall Weekend until a new social code is drawn up limiting parties. (They want them over before 4:00 a.m.! Also, they want chaperones. Imagine, chaperones!) This is quite a place. The “Weekends” usually are a series of parties for the entire 72-hour period. Maybe it would be best for you to come some other weekend.” Needless to say, the undergraduates were very disturbed with this change in the freedom once afforded them.
A major rite-of-passage for every graduate student is the passing of the foreign language exam, held at the beginning of each semester. My letter to Karen, written in late September, had an interesting set of comments: “This evening I took the German qualifying. Although I was very anxious about the exam, it really wasn’t as hard as I expected. I may have passed it. Word is that only a few pass it the first time. Some have tried for four terms! Afterwards, I went to the grad open house at The Straight. There I heard three excellent campus singing groups: two male, the “Sherwoods” and the “Cayuga’s Waiters,” and the female “Notables.” The songs were really cute. I’ll try to buy one of the “Waiters’” records for you. The AX’s would like it.”
I later learned I did pass the German qualifying examination and would not need to take a language class until I did pass it. Furthermore, it was not uncommon for The Straight to be the venue for campus song-gatherings. One undergraduate student at the time was Peter Yarrow who performed his folk songs in the Ivy Room and, after graduation, joined with two others, Paul and Mary, to continue a singing career!
I had conflicting self-views about my academic work at Cornell. In an early letter I wrote: “I had my first lectures today – biochem, bacteriology, and advanced organic. The first two weren’t bad but the last one assumed either I am already an organic chemist or a genius at learning. Anyway, I’m getting use to the system. The lectures are amazing in their size. The classes are about 50 to 100. It’s straight lecture rather than the lecture-recitation classes we have at Kent.”
At the beginning of October, I wrote: “I’ve developed, or perhaps reacquire, a passion for studying. I had it once and then lost it. But I enjoy studying here – even if I have to do so much of it. Perhaps I enjoy it because it is the only avenue open to me to prove myself. And yet I tell myself I want to learn more – that there is so much to learn and so little time to do it. I’m not sure why I feel the later. Perhaps, it is because I want to understand what’s going on around here. When my biochem colleagues begin talking shop, I feel like screaming, “Have you seen Hamlet?!” The cream of high school goes to college. And the cream of college goes to graduate school. Yet at times, I’m only a part of the milk that didn’t get homogenized the right way. I realize I have the potential, but I didn’t realize I’d have to work so hard to develop it.”
In addition to courses in biochemistry, bacteriology, and advanced organic chemistry, I was enrolled in another “undergraduate” course: comparative anatomy. At the time, I did enjoy all of them, perhaps because they were “undergraduate” classes. I had not taken certain subjects at Kent and, being deficient in these areas had to study them for my major in biochemistry and minor fields of endocrinology and organic chemistry.
As it turned out, I did so well in the advanced organic chemistry class that the professor thought I should change to this field as my major. It’s well I did not. Although I was adept at the three-dimensional visualization needed for stereochemistry, a significant part of the organic chemistry emphasized in this course, I was not able to recall all of the multiple conditions needed to synthesize every type of organic compound from “ethanol,” which seemed to be the requirement to be a major in the field.
It was also, during this course in organic chemistry that I learned how to decipher English terms related to American ones. My distinguished British professor preferred “e-thile” and “me-thile” in his lectures; my own ears kept expecting “ethyl” and “methyl.” The following semester, I had a similar problem with my professor in endocrinology, who, later, became a member of my doctoral committee. I finally learned to translate his mumbled “hypa” into either “hypo” or “hyper” in order to follow his lectures meaningfully in a discipline where “low” and “high” do have significant differences for how the body reacts to various hormone levels.
I also recall the many hours I spent with “Beilstein,” a multi-volume database (written in German!) for every organic molecule discovered before 1957. At the same time, I vividly remember that the only way I passed qualitative analysis, in which a student needed to identify an “unknown” molecular product by its physical properties, was due to my landlady, at the time. Mrs. O’Mara allowed me to smell all of her spices. I knew my “unknown” smelled “spicy,” but did not know which one it might be until I knowingly inhaled cinnamon!
My major problem in the undergraduate science classes I was required to take was due to the competitive nature of fellow students. It was not uncommon for one of them to bump a microscope “accidently” so that the marker, pointing toward a particular sub-cellular structure, would be moved slightly. The result would be that the next student, undertaking the exam to identify the chosen structure, would be misled. Exams in comparative anatomy were easier than those in microbiology. It was more difficult to mess up a bone concealed in a bag, for identification in the test, than it was to jiggle a microscope. Most of the accidents were caused by pre-med students who wanted to score higher in order to be assured entrance into the professional schools they wanted!
Graduate level seminars and lectures were easier. There, the students collaborated more than at the undergraduate level. I enjoyed those classes, except when the lights were dimmed for viewing slide-projections; that’s when my eyelids tended to close down. Although I made passing grades at Cornell, my averages had been much higher at Kent State. I was never sure if the cause was related to a difference in the academic acuteness of the two institutions or to my being more “average” than I once thought.
Snippets on academic life at Cornell would not be complete without a comment about the life of academicians, per se. In January 1958, I wrote the following summary for Karen: “I just came back from a cocktail party – OK, if you prefer the truth – a graduate beer party. And actually, it wasn’t that either. It was a qualifying party. And that doesn’t sound right. Let me put it this way – Evelyn Havir, Louise Anderson, and Paul Kindle – 3 biochem grad students just passed their qualifying exams and had a party at the girls’ apartment. There were faculty, married grads, and stags there. I had an enjoyable time talking – and I didn’t have that much to drink.
The conversations covered all shades of small talk and included the academics of legumes with Nona, from the Philippines via Ohio State; induced trauma in the uterine tissue of pseudo-pregnant rats with Mrs. Hess – she’s getting a PhD in endo from Harvard, her husband is a biochem prof here; ruminants with Dallas Boggs from W. Virginia; nose bleeds with Trygve Tuve – his father is a nuclear physicist at Colorado and “Trig” himself is an expert on selenium as a trace element; speech pathology with Alice (something-or-other) – her husband was entertaining – a quasi-intellectual from Purdue with whom I traded comments on music, philosophy, and literature. I knew as much as he did, which isn’t saying much.” This could also summarize many true cocktail parties I endured as a faculty member throughout the rest of my academic-research-administration career!