Mary Blackwell

Q: What have you been up to since you graduated?

A: I went off to University of Illinois - Urbana, "studied" philosophy, cut a lot of classes, and joined the peace movement. After sophomore year, I got married for a really great reason: I hated having roommates in the dorms. Couple years later, decided to have a baby for another great reason: the baby clothes in the department stores were so cute. The baby became my gloriously talented and fabulous daughter, Hilary Laurel McLean. And I dropped out of school during my senior year, just months from graduating, for another good reason: I preferred to watch daytime soap operas.

They ended the student draft deferment. My husband, Mike McLean (from Jacksonville IL), got drafted. He was able to defer his drafting by signing up to join the Air Force as an officer. He became a pilot of tankers (KC 135s) right about when Nixon changed from a mostly ground war to a hugely air war, and spent a lot of time in Thailand. We lived in several air force bases (Laredo, Castle, Westover, Plattsburgh).

In 1974, I returned to school to finish my BA and decided I wanted to go to medical school. I needed a couple of extra years of schooling which I carried out at UMass - Amherst and SUNY-Plattsburgh.

I yielded to the siren call of my generation by setting forth to liberate myself. I went out to Berkeley for another good reason: I had always wanted to live in SF and so I applied to SF State with UC Berkeley, a far better school, as backup, and if I enrolled in grad school I would actually get paid a living wage. As I had no other skills, and hated work of any sort, this was an ideal solution. SF State turned me down, but the chemistry department at UC Berkeley accepted me.

It took me six years to finish my PhD while also being a single mother. After that, I spent six months writing a computer program at IBM, then 3 years as a post doc at Imperial College - London (I had applied for and received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship to go there). Once again, the latter was done for a good reason -- I wanted to be with the love of my life, whom I'd met when he was a post doc at Berkeley, who then returned to go to medical school at Charing Cross Hospital in London.

Since one of us needed meaningful employment, after 3 years I returned to do a post doc for two years at U of I - Urbana (and wow was that mindboggling, coming back 20 years after graduating, like some inverted Rip Van Winkle, since Urbana hadn't changed in 20 years, but I had).

Finally, it was time to get a "real job" even though I had entirely lost all ambition but still ya gotta eat. I applied for academic jobs, accepted the first one I was offered - as assistant professor of chemistry at Lawrence University -- managed enough ambition to get tenured, taught physical chemistry for about 20 years, and then retired in 2012.

Since then, for the first time in my life, I have been in my element, doing exactly what I have always wanted to do, which is to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Turns out I don't want to do much besides living with dogs and creating 3d furniture and horses and stuff on Second Life and other virtual worlds.