Karen Barteld, our Graduate Adviser, felt bad about the lack of Geography grad student participants during the UCSB Graduate Student Appreciation Week, April 7-11 when many of our grads were at the AAG Annual Meetings. Well, if you throw a party and nobody comes, is it a party? Existentialist considerations aside, our grad students are a raison d’être for the Department, and they deserve major recognition. Accordingly, Karen organized an impromptu Grad Appreciation event just before colloquium on May 15—and just after Staff Appreciation week, which the grads so generously organized and orchestrated.
The tables outside of Buchanan Hall that were laden with cake and strawberries attracted a lot of non-geography people, but Karen and fellow staff sternly shooed them away. Grad students finally came out of the woodwork, devoured the food, and were given reusable coffee cups by the Ellison Hall Sustainability Committee before settling down to a talk by UCLA Professor of Geography David Rigby, titled “Impacts of trade on wage inequality: Analysis of matched employer-employee data for Los Angeles, 1990-2000.”
Dr. Rigby’s talk was preceded by a quick Power Point background show of pictures of our grads and a short “thank you to our grads” speech by Vice Chair Dar Roberts. Then, second-year grad student Keely Roth took the floor to commend Professor Roberts, who, incidentally, just won the UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award. The harmonious juxtaposition of socializing, personal accolades, and pure academia is a good example of what makes our Department of Geography more than the sum of its parts.
Editor’s pedantic note re synergy: To quote Arthur Koestler, “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.”
