The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once said that “order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within”. I believe that the third year of graduate school is as close to that internal equilibrium that a graduate student can attain. While the first year is replete with new experiences, the second year with candidacy exams, and the ultimate task of the dissertation and defense lies ahead in future years, the third year graduate student has successfully learned how to manage a full schedule without losing sanity.

Third year graduate students understand the meaning of hard work yet fully appreciate the pleasure that can result from a night off. Whispering sweet nothings into an ear late on a warm Arizona evening can be translated into pleading with the instrument to give us some meaningful data. Long days (and nights) working hard are balanced with the occasional long lunch extended into happy hour on a sunny afternoon at a local brewery. Whereas this might have turned into an all-night overindulgence in our first year, or we may have become total recluses while preparing for oral exams, as third years, we know how to work hard, but play hard too.

With the ability to balance comes an increased sense of confidence. Instead of meekly standing in front of a poster at a conference secretly hoping that no one will pose any overly difficult questions (or any questions at all), we now have the confidence (supported with knowledge) to attend the social networking events at the conferences not for the free drinks, but to flaunt our group’s research to anyone who will listen. There’s no trepidation that accompanied us as first years, nor the pressure to find a job that will be of concern in future years.

I think an appropriate simile to describe the third year of grad school can be found in The Wizard of Oz, as the group stumbles upon Emerald City for the first time. Dorothy has made her friends on her journey, they have survived The Dark Forest (or, what we would call our oral exams), and the trials with the witch (or our struggles with writing our dissertation) lie far enough in the future that they are of no immediate concern. While some grad students may be using this recess of stress to “sleep in the field of poppies”, others, like myself, are forging ahead, eager for the challenges that loom in the distance.

James Cronican was recently named to USA Today’s 2007 All-USA College Academic Second Team for his outstanding leadership and intellectual achievement. Cronican is now an ASU graduate, when he first began his academic career here in Tempe, he worked on his research with Wilson Francisco, an associate professor of biochemistry. Also a National Merit Scholar, Cronican turned down Harvard to attend ASU with the hopes of one day making it back to Harvard for graduate school.

Cronican won an Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative grant three years after beginning his research to further develop an instrument he had designed at ASU to rapidly and automatically extract DNA and RNA from tissue. Professor Fredric Zenhausern from the Biodesign Institute and Cronican also submitted a patent application for the device which could potentially influence the everyday work of clinical researchers and molecular biologists. This past spring, Cronican proudly graduated from ASU and then a summer internship at Bayer in Berlin. Just as he had planned, he will be attending graduate school this fall at Harvard and he has future plans to have a career developing enzymes for industrial and medicinal uses. (Story source: CLAS News)

At the annual Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) conference in Orlando, Florida in September, 2006, Chemistry and Biochemistry graduate students Matt Petkus, Nicole Zwick-Kozup and Melissa Mclauchlin were awarded two firsts and second place, respectively, for their poster presentations. The three PhD students made quite an impact on the poster session segment of the conference representing Dr. Mark Hayes’ research group.