When she is found
Stanford Professor Bruce Wooley opened Friday’s lecture on circuit design with a lesson about a more important set of connections.
“If you feel stress — and we all do, and sometimes it’s positive — say it to somebody,’’ he told his students. “Find a friend. Talk to your research supervisor or any faculty member. Anybody, just so it doesn’t build inside.’’
“They heard me,’’ Wooley, the genial chairman of the university’s renowned department of electrical engineering, said later, discussing the apparent suicide of Stanford graduate student May Zhou. “But do they actually believe me? Who knows. They put so much pressure on themselves. Things are very different than when I went to school.’’
Yes, Professor Wooley, things are much different than when you went to school. Back then, when the good-ole-boy network set careers in motion, pressure was not a concern. Why was that so? Was it because certain privileges paved the way towards a secure academic future? Was it the massive influx of government funding for certain kinds of scientific research during the Cold War that later granted your generation of academics the new found power of controlling the conditions of their employment through corporate funding? Was it that ‘circuit design’ did not yet interfere with day-to-day communication, entertainment, and commerce? The answer is not very important right now.
What is important now is why today’s graduate students might be thought to be inflicting upon themselves an unprecedented amount of pressure. Why such pressure cannot be imagined as coming from the inveterate competition and salesmanship of Professor Wooley’s classroom or the corporate dynamic of the contemporary university system itself.
After she is found, is it not the most apathetic cold shoulder when today’s university claims its students’ pressures are self-imposed and then continue on with its day-to-day routines? Is it not the most contemptuous arrogance to claim it is the students who might not be listening when Mengyao Zhou is found in Santa Rosa Community College?
Police in Santa Rosa, where Zhou’s body was found in the trunk of her car, said Saturday that although they continue to suspect she took her life, it might be weeks before a final determination. If her death is ruled a suicide, Zhou would be the second Stanford student to take her life this month, and at least the fifth since summer 2005, according to police reports.
more: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16565917.htm
I was in the paint store, vacantly tapping a stir stick on the glass counter when I saw the photograph of May. She had been on my mind since Rich forwarded an email which included few details of her disappearance. I imagined she drove away to a happier place, but at the same time, I thought she might have taken her life. I don’t know why Stanford fell from the picture. Maybe it’s because this was not a place she could fix. May had two choices: find a new space to call home or remove herself permanently from the features of any academic/research landscape.
I unfolded the paper and began to read. She was an intelligent woman, “driven” and “motivated,” as described by her peers. May passed her orals in her first year, and received a prestigious fellowship shortly afterwards to foster her research. Her body was found in the trunk of her car. She must have been tired in that parking lot. Crying in that parking lot. Alone in that parking lot. And with so much she had accomplished and so much she was yet to discover, she must have wanted to hide all her desperate and lonely feelings from anyone who could see her now. She fell asleep in a windowless box and was quietly towed away.
The e-flyer sent by the Stanford University Department of Public Safety noted May was “at risk.” Why was she deemed “at risk” before she was found? Did they know? If she was in a state of peril before she disappeared, why wasn’t this vulnerability – or the very present vulnerability of hundreds of others – taken seriously? The campus officials easily decided upon May’s critical condition, yet she died anyway.
But the question to be asked does not exist in what could have stopped her or who could have comforted her in her greatest hour of need. The question is not why students impose pressure upon themselves, as Rich has so vigorously exposed. The pressure is neither imagined nor self-constructed. It comes from without. It burdens, requires, constrains, inflicts. It trespasses, assuming possession of another’s property or rights. May was an intelligent woman, “driven,” “motivated.” While running, demand caught up with her. Those five patents pending in her Master’s thesis from MIT turned her creativity into potential capital. There is beauty evident in her work – a real-time digital image processing function which would “create realistic water reflections in varying weather conditions, perform localized magnification and pinching, transform photographs to perspective view, adding fog and shadow,” in her words. But there are also inhuman hours spent testing and retesting in fluorescent-lit labs.
May didn’t find a quiet street. She did not look for an empty alleyway. She drove to a community college ninety miles north of Stanford University, ninety miles closer to a happier place. The door was only feet away. And the patent agreement she signed when she joined Stanford’s graduate community ensures anything she discovered upon this campus will be forever owned by it.
Comment by kiersten — January 31, 2007 @ 1:43 am