Graduation

The Ultimate Investment

It's been four eventful years since I began my college career. I've never worked, or played, so hard in my life. However, life has a funny way of moving on, and I'm afraid I must leave college behind, taking with me fond memories, life lessons, fantastic friendships, and a sheepskin. Put that way, the sheepskin doesn't sound too exciting, but I assure you, it was a very expensive item requiring various forms of payments. (e.g. blood, sweat, tears, loans, loans, loans)

I graduated with a B.A. in honors anthropology from the University of Notre Dame in May. Anthropology (from the Greek word anthropos meaning "human" or "person") is the study of humans, past and present. It is divided into four subfields: cultural, biological, archaeology, and linguistics. "Oh, so you'll dig up stuff like Indiana Jones?" you might ask. No! Jones was a terrible archaeologist, ignoring context and provenience completely while stealing, sorry, "saving" only the glittery stuff that the Nazis were after. I would like a fedora though. Anthropologists study everything from ancient Polynesian mythology to contemporary mother-infant sleeping habits, genocide to indigenous conflict-resolution, chimp kin groups to hominin fossils, incipient agriculture to slash and burn food production, remote Bushmen to corporate America. It's a road field with many career possibilities. I mean, people are everywhere. Why not hire an anthropologist? (rhetorical)

During my college career I...

-studied human-monkey interactions on the Rock of Gibraltar in the summer of 2004.

-spent a semester in Greece in the spring of 2005. Here are some tidbits: Greek men compliment women by hissing at them. Souvlaki costs $2. Feta is best when served with potatoes fried in olive oil. The evil eye will afflict you sooner or later. Only in Greece is it impossible to fly to Istanbul; flights only go to Constantinople. When faced with the prospect of being stranded on an island with only $1.50 to your name, your reservations about sneaking onto a ferry disappear...like the monkey in your wallet had.

-interned at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in the summer of 2005. My job was to collect information about Native American artifacts in the records, which aided in the material's repatriation.

-participated in marching band for four seasons.

-discovered Notre Dame football.

-ate lunch with a "terrorist."

-cut up goat meat with stone tools.

-acquired and cooked octopus.

-ate real key lime pie in Key West.

-got locked in a partking garage in New York City.

-slept on a bar floor in Istanbul.

-slept on a street in Rome.

-slept on a beach in Spain.

-swam with sharks.

-wrote a legitimate paper on Harry Potter.

-wrote a legitimate paper on vampires.

-memorized the known hominins from ~5 mya to the present.

-learned that you'll be tens of thousands of dollars to go to school without much hesitations, but when a laundry machine steals a quarter, you are pissed.