Nature & Nurture | Giving News
Perhaps It Was Something in the Water
DUML Undergraduates from 1977 Maintain LIfelong Bonds
by Lisa M. Dellwo
The roughly 40 undergraduates who spent the spring of 1977
at the Duke Marine Laboratory had
no Gameboys or iPods and maybe just one stereo between them.
Cell phones and personal computers didn’t exist, the Internet
wasn’t invented yet, and Beaufort had not become a fashionable
stop for yachters on the Intercoastal Waterway. Cable or satellite
television? Forget about it. One TV channel would broadcast
only intermittently. Some of the women lived in a trailer
and everyone else in old dorms.
It was the time of their lives.
Maybe it was the enforced togetherness that made the Marine
Lab experience so much fun for the 1977 undergraduates, mostly
juniors. “We were constantly with each other,” recalls Nancy
Freund Heller, now an executive with TIAA-CREF Asset Management.
“Only a few classes were offered, so we took most of them
together. Everyone lived in close contact. We ate together
and we partied together. You didn’t want to stay in that little
trailer alone.”
“Perhaps it was something in the water at the time,” speculates
Mei Ling Yee, an ophthalmologist in private practice in New
Jersey, who adds, “There was something magical about our group
in 1977.” An undergraduate at Colgate, Yee was one of a handful
of Marine Lab students who came from colleges other than Duke.
She says her ties to a group that spent just five months together
remain stronger than those to her Colgate classmates.
Other than swimming off the Marine Lab dock and boating over
to Shackleford Banks for picnics and shell collecting, the
group’s main form of entertainment was music. “Some of us
had musical instruments, and some of us could sing, or thought
we could,” says Peter Griffith, now a contract scientist at
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and president of the Nicholas
School Alumni Council. They formed the Beaufort Blues Band
and commandeered the dining hall for music and dancing.
Salt Air and High-Caliber Field Trips
Lifelong friendships were forged at the Marine Lab that summer.
But Griffith says that the academic challenges also made their
stay memorable. “For a lot of us, it might have been our first
time in really small classes where we could question and challenge
research scientists. For our independent study projects, we
could devise our own research questions, collect organisms
at sea or from the marshes, and follow through with weeks
of laboratory analysis.” If students were awake at 3 a.m.,
it wasn’t just because they were breaking into the dining
hall for ice cream. They were more frequently in the labs,
often helping each other pour chromatography columns or load
the ultracentrifuge.
Many of the professors at the Marine Lab then are familiar
presences today, Joseph
Bonaventura, Celia
Bonaventura and Richard
Forward, for example. Heller recalls a Parents Weekend
field trip led by Orrin
Pilkey that had a “profound effect” on her family. “That
caliber of field trip, waking up smelling the salt air, having
professors who were really excited to be there”—these all
combined to make the academic experience unforgettable.
The classes offered at the Marine Lab in those days were
upper level science courses, and most of the students were
botany or zoology majors, “or something closely related,”
says Griffith. Many of the students went into medical fields,
including Yee, the ophthalmologist, and Christopher Newgard,
who was recently named director of the Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition
Center at Duke University Medical Center. Some of them left
science altogether, including fund manager Heller, art therapist
Julie Deal, and a handful of at-home moms. Like Griffith,
many continued as research scientists, inspired in part by
their Marine Lab semester.
Doing Something for the Marine Lab
And they stayed in touch. In 1997, Griffith helped organize
a 20th-anniversary reunion. It was for just the former students,
no spouses. As Yee says, “We would not have enough time to
reminisce without explaining it all to them.” So successful
was that reunion that they planned another for 2002, this
one including families. Former Marine Lab director John Costlow
made an appearance, and, partly inspired by his presence,
the classmates decided to raise funds to assist undergraduates
studying at the Marine Lab today.
By that time, the friends were out of the “student impoverished
zone” and the “new parent impoverished zone,” says Griffith,
and probably in their peak earning years. It was a good time
to do something for the Marine Lab.
They created the Undergraduate Research Endowment, a discretionary
fund that the Marine Lab director can use to enhance the undergraduate
research experience there, by allowing students to obtain
specialized supplies, travel to do sampling, or purchase boat
time.
Although the Fund was conceived by the Class of 1977, Griffith
says, “We don’t consider it ‘ours,’” and adds that other Marine
Lab alumni are encouraged to participate. Just under $3,500
is needed for the Fund to reach its goal of $25,000, which
will generate an income of about $1,000 per year for student
grants.
These days, the Marine Lab welcomes undergraduates from Duke
and other colleges during spring, fall, and summer terms,
and offers a sufficient variety of courses so that even non-science
majors can enjoy the Beaufort experience. The Undergraduate
Research Fund will help make that experience even more meaningful
for some of them, thanks to the lifelong friends from the
Class of 1977.
The DUML Spring Semester Class of 1977 invites anyone who
spent time at the Marine Lab to assist current students by
giving to the Undergraduate Research Endowment. For further
information, contact Krista Bofill, director of alumni affairs
and the annual fund, 919-613-8035; k.bofill@duke.edu.
more nature & nurture
> |
