The first pancake
Dr. Meyer-Kaiser and Dr. Schrage "Grad students are like pancakes: the first one always comes out a little funky." - just a thing that academics say to each other Ladies and gentleman, I have incredible news: my very first PhD student, Kharis Schrage, has graduated! Last week, Kharis successfully defended her dissertation and completed the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. She has earned the title of Dr. Schrage. I am immensely proud of Kharis. She joined my lab in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when all field work was stalled and nobody know where the world was headed. Kharis wanted to focus her dissertation on the Arctic ecosystem, so she asked me to estimate the probability that I could get her to the Arctic within the 5-year program. I estimated 95%. In the end, Kharis made 5 trips to the Arctic during her PhD, including a few without me. She collected enough samples to fill an entire shelf of our lab freezer and enough data to fill its own hard drive. She prod...