(From left to right) Anne Conger McCants, Elizabeth A. S. Talbot, Raj Seshadri
This year's recipients of the Mary Lyon Award, presented at convocation this year, each spoke briefly on what Mount Holyoke has meant to them. Excerpts from their inspiring remarks are below.
Elizabeth Anne Seton Talbot '88, who gives "front-line service" in the fight against infectious diseases, said the "most transforming education" she received at Mount Holyoke was in "the core curriculum of life: to discover horrific suffering in the world, respond to it, and emerge with hope. If you are like me, Mount Holyoke may be the first backdrop for your discovery of vast refugee camps, the atrocities of father against daughter, and a human nature that perpetuates genocide, past, present, and likely future. We learn there is a disparity between the routine of our evening M & Cs and the third world's hunger. Perhaps college is where we first blaze images of burning villages and cross-fire civilians on television while we are in pursuit of the X-Files or the final Seinfeld episode. There are earthquakes in Colombia and famine in the Sudan while we sled behind Rockefeller Hall."
Offering relief is "the only admissible response" to such suffering, Talbot said, noting that it's also vital to protect the fragile hope that motivates selfless actions. As an infectious disease specialist, she battles hopelessness as well as TB, HIV, and other outbreaks. "It is tempting to withdraw and limit ourselves to the finite task of personal survival," she admitted. "But I echo Henri Nouwen for myself and for anyone else in need of encouragement right now. 'Do not give up working for peace...Do not let yourselves be distracted by the great noises of war, the dramatic descriptions of misery and the sensational expressions of human cruelty. These make you numb, and create feelings of shame, guilt, and powerlessness.' Nurture hope and compassion in the pursuit of competence."
Economic historian Anne Conger McCants '84 said, "I have a great appreciation for the rituals of community which punctuate the academic year at Mount Holyoke, and it is a pleasure to be able to participate in one of them again with you. My current institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will itself commence the new semester in just five days, but instead of pausing to reflect with my fellow teachers and our students about the intellectual and moral mission which lies ahead, I find myself instead simply feeling anxious about the syllabus which is not yet finalized and the many projects which will not be off my desk before the resumption of classes. Marking commencement as a communal rite is something we should do though, for it is not enough to discharge our responsibility to our students to simply have the reading list and our notes in order. So much more goes on in a semester than just the mechanical transmission of facts and ideas from faculty to students and back again."
"After reflecting upon my own experience at Mount Holyoke, I realize that I am most appreciative of the education that was never on someone's syllabus, but was nonetheless effected by a committed faculty and a challenging group of peers--the acquisition of the values which now guide my personal and professional life," said McCants. "To the extent to which I can foster in my own students an appreciation for the complexity of life, an understanding of their connection to the past, a sense of responsibility for those living around them, and the development of a personal moral compass by which to chart their lives, I will have gone a long way toward repaying the debt I feel to Mount Holyoke."
Management consultant and physicist Raj Seshadri '87 said that, if asked to describe what Mount Holyoke meant to her in one word, it would be choices. "I came to Mount Holyoke from India to avoid choosing...in India I would have made one professional choice at age eighteen and lived with it essentially forever. Mount Holyoke not only gave me choices implicitly, by providing an alternative path, it also explicitly gave me choices by opening up many dimensions I was unaware of."
"It is here that I learnt about leadership at Brigham Hall and entrepreneurship at the Academic Computing Center. It is here in the physics department that I built a little steam engine in my machine shop class, and in the process acquired a skill that was invaluable not just for graduate work in physics but also for renovating the apartment we purchased this past year. I learnt the value of work not just in the classroom but also while working to pay for my education--in the dining service, while grading problem sets, while driving the campus shuttle, while working at graduation."
Seshadri recalled a talk with a physics professor over what she should do after graduation. "I think of what he said to me even today. He said, 'You'll do well at whatever you want to do provided it is what you want to do, and that can change over the course of your life.'...I have since been unafraid of making changes--it isn't that I no longer agonize over each change--but the agonizing is over a different issue--what do I really want to do? Mount Holyoke gave me the confidence to pursue what I wanted, and embrace changes and surmount challenges to get there. ... When I graduated almost twelve years ago, I thought what Mount Holyoke had given me was a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics. I now realize that what Mount Holyoke actually gave me is the appreciation for variety and the confidence that I could pursue any path I choose."
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