"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

Hello, I'm Thelia Joan Witkin and I graduated in 1955 fully expecting that at some point I would go on for an advanced degree. When I graduated, I had very skimpy major meaning I had the bare minimum of classes in zoology, which was my major. And so, I stayed at Mount Holyoke. I came back and I was here for two years. I got my Masters in Zoology and the years kind of blend for me except for that I was living in a different dorm. I wasn't living in an undergraduate dorm. It was a little graduate house down at the other side of campus, so, although I was still on campus, it was a different kind of life. But my life really centered around Clapp laboratory and I was mostly interested in microscopic anatomy. Still am, and I had the privilege to work with the really ,really marvelous women who were the professors in the department. Particularly Christiana Smith,, who became a very food friend, snd Tibby Sprig, Isabel Sprig and Bessy Boyd. And so I stayed there and did my two years getting a masters degree and actually the experience that I had has probably been the most valuable for my later career, meaning that now, for the past twenty something years, I have been teaching medical students at Columbia and I get them looking down the microscope. There was a little hiatus in my career, meaning that I met someone and got married and had three children and I didn't feel comfortable and things weren't quite as easy in those days to have the children seen after, in one way or another. So, I stayed home and had fun with the children until the last one was in school full time and then I went back and got a degree. I got my PhD and actually I don't know whether we're running out of time, and this is sort of a silly story, but I ended up doing my PhS in anthropology for weird reasons, meaning that I really should have been doing it in biology, I would say. But, we lived near New York City and so Columbia was kind of the choice and besides my family, Columbia was kind of home to me. Anyway, so I applied for the graduate program in either biology and then in anatomy and neither program would take me because my idea was I was going to get home at 3 o'clock when the children came home from school. And that just doesn't match with graduate student life. You'll find out one day when you become a graduate student, it's, you know, what do they say, "24/7?" Anyway, so I thought, there's anthrapology, which has physical anthropology, so I went and talked to the chairman of the anthropology department, who it happened that year was a black man, who was a terrific person and he said, if an anthropology department can't think if the main needs of women, it's kind of too bad. So, I got a degree in anthropology and it was marvelous and I feel so lucky and Mount Holyoke was, I have to say, at the basis of it all. It is one terrific place.