 Well, that was a tough act to follow. I could beat box for you. Take me back a little. So my name is Stephanie Rowley, and I'm a professor in psychology. I'm also the chair of psychology right now. And I am just really excited to see you all here. So I just absolutely love the first day of school, the whole idea of looking forward to all the possibilities and excitement. And I think there's something really special about graduate school that you have opted to really move into a space that lots of people are not able to. So I'm always fascinated by the fact that really a small number of people, less than 10%, actually end up doing a master's or doctorate. And then you add to that that you all have chosen to come to the absolute finest place of higher education in the world. Pretty impressive. So congratulations for making the right choice in that. You're laughing, but I actually know a lot about this. So I have been connected to the University of Michigan my entire life. You might think I exaggerate all the time. My students might say that I do. But my dad was an alum of Michigan. So back in the 60s, he was a student here. And my brother was a student here in the 80s. And I was a student here in the 90s. And so I really do know a lot about Michigan. So I can really say confidently that this really is the best university in the world. And I mean, I think there's also some data that would lead in that direction. And I have been other places. So this is not the only place I've been. I went to the University of Virginia for graduate school, which was really wonderful. And then I taught for three years at UNC Chapel Hill. And this is still the best place in the world. And you are the best students in the world. So one of the things that often happens when you get here as a student is once you start classes, you kind of forget about the rigorous process that you and we went through to get you here. As someone who has chaired many, many admissions committees, I know that we spend tireless hours. We look at every application. We sit down and imagine each of you being here with us. And so it's not a mistake. So when next week you start classes and it feels like maybe everybody knows something that you don't know or everybody's been someplace you haven't been or worked with some famous person someplace else that you haven't been able to work with, remember that we chose you on purpose and that we're very serious about this. And that our students are really our best asset. So I just had two students finish. Adriana and Sarah and one of my first year students said isn't it really sad when your students move on and you have to do this kind of over and over again. And I said absolutely. So these are doctoral students. So they worked with me for five years and it is really sad. In fact, I was up really late last night until 1030 texting Sarah. She just took a postdoc position and we were saying how much we missed talking and hanging out and so my students really are just amazing. They really enrich my own work. I can give you lots of examples of where students working with faculty members took them on a completely new pathway that really opened up their research. So you should never underestimate your value to us as faculty for sure. And you should feel really confident in contributing to the work that's going on here at Michigan because if it weren't for you our work I think really would stagnate. So I wanted to tell you a story about one of my students. He graduated several years ago now maybe five or six years ago. I'll call him Jamie just cause there are people in the room who might know him but. So we had a really hard time. I think a lot of times at first day of school everybody wants to tell you all the positive stories but we had a really hard time. So he wasn't sure he wanted to come to graduate school. He was really engaged with a bunch of things in the community back in New York where he grew up and felt like he was a teacher. He felt like he was selling out the kids who he had been working so closely with low income really poor kids in inner city New York. And he thought that maybe by doing this intellectual thing that he wasn't doing the right thing. And then he also felt a little different I think coming from, how many people are from New York? So this is not New York. The culture is a little different. He felt a little different when he got here. He also didn't have a traditional academic path. So he, one of my favorite stories was that he started out kindergarten. They told him that he couldn't start in this special private school because he was mentally retarded. They told his parents that he was never gonna really do well in school and that he would need some specialized help. So this is Dr. Jamie at the moment. So I think he was always a little bit shy about academics. And the first two years, boy, he would come to my office and we had these weird conversations where we didn't make eye contact, just didn't connect and just felt like he was turning and his work really late. And oftentimes it was too late for me to give proper feedback. And it just didn't feel too good to me. I can only imagine how I felt to him. Well, it all came to a head. So in this particular program we have a portfolio experience, which is really nice. So we have three faculty members who come and look at all of the work that you've done over the first three years. And one of the pieces is a reflection paper. So oddly enough, the reflection wasn't part of his portfolio before we got to the meeting, which is not that surprising. It's just a couple of pages about what their first few years were like. Well, imagine my surprise when I opened the document and it was full of anger and disappointment, saying this program is terrible. I haven't gotten good feedback. I haven't gotten good mentoring. Nobody's taking care of me. And of course this is directed at me. I was, whoa. So here I had thought that he didn't like me and that the reason we weren't connecting was because there was something about me that he didn't like. Here he was thinking it was something about him that I didn't like him for some reason. It wasn't just me, but other advisors of his. So we had an interesting meeting, as you might imagine. We sat down and we spent the whole meeting instead of talking about his academic record, we talked about the issues that he had laid out in his reflection paper. It was a hard meeting, you can imagine. But at the end of the meeting, what we realized is that we had sort of been working at cross purposes and not hearing or seeing each other. So after the meeting, he actually brought me flowers, which was nice. But after the meeting we spent time building a relationship. So we spent time really talking about what his goals were, where he was headed, what he wanted out of life, and some of the problems that we had had as a mentor and mentee. And we really got on a good foot after that. So I learned a few things from that interaction. So I should tell you then to the story first, which is a really wonderful story. So he ended up really flourishing after that, connected with a bunch of peers. So one of the things is he was pretty socially isolated. But after that, I told him that lots of other students had had similar feelings about the program and that if he had connected with them, he might have a sense of how they had dealt with feeling isolated, feeling different. Also, he was able to develop a group of friends that he worked with and collaborated with. And so his work really took off in terms of his research productivity. He also got some help. He went to Sweetland Writing Center and got feedback on his writing, which was one of the sticking points of his early career, which was really helpful. A wonderful resource. I think everyone sitting in the room should go to Sweetland. They have counselors there who can, or consultants who sit there and work through your writing issues. We all have something. And the other thing is we opened up really valuable communication. So he goes on to write this amazing dissertation. This dissertation won, first, the ProQuest Dissertation Award, which is an external award that's judged by the ProQuest Corporation that is here in Ann Arbor. He won an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award. He won an internal award to the School of Education. He has gotten NSF grants. He's doing really well as a professor. He got a faculty position right after school. So imagine he became wildly successful after this. A few lessons that we learned. The first thing is that difficult things happen in graduate school. It's not easy. Otherwise everyone would do it. The issue is not whether or not you face difficulty in adversity, but how you respond to it. I think in Jamie's case, he said, I had some misperceptions. I corrected them, and then I moved on. And really, I mean, it took a lot for him to make himself vulnerable in that position. And so you can imagine, there will be times when something happens, when you need to be vulnerable, to go to your advisor, your professor, your friend, and say, look, I messed up. What can we do to fix this? I also had to do the same thing, by the way. But really, he stepped up to the plate and was an adult about it and said, I want something out of this. And if I don't do something different, I'm not going to get it. Each of you deserves really great mentoring, great instruction, and sometimes you have to ask for it. Sometimes it's not there in the way that it should be. The second thing was, he learned to embrace his weakness. This is painful. Part of graduate school, everyone comes with a set of skills that's why you're here. Everyone has had wonderful experiences and been a great student. And everyone has weaknesses. And if you leave here with those same weaknesses, you have cheated yourself, you've cheated the world, you've spent somebody's money, and really ended not with what you came to get. Embrace your weaknesses, acknowledge it, write them down, and then come up with a plan for how you'll address them. He went to the Writing Center. He sat down with me and said, tell me what my strengths and weaknesses are. And we came up with a plan. He utilized his peer resources and said, how have you dealt with whatever the issue is? You have to be vulnerable. I had a similar experience. As a grad student, I was a stats consultant. I was great at stats. It was a long time ago. But I was not a good writer. I was not a good writer at all. And people let me go, and I let myself go. And so I graduated. I had all these publications because everybody wanted me on their publications because I could do stats. But when I became an assistant professor, I couldn't write. And so I'm getting these reviews back on these papers and they're saying, oh, great stats, but the writing sucks. And so I had to humble myself and get help. I had to go to my colleagues and say, I don't know how to do this, can you help me? Really deeply painful. If I had done it when I was a graduate student, imagine how much time I could have saved as an assistant professor. Thankfully it all worked out. So really developing a network of people who can help and support you. The last thing is really impression management. There's a strong pull for graduate students to appear to be all together all the time. Nobody is all together all the time. And if you allow your fear of looking stupid, of asking the stupid question in class, of now, you know, you don't wanna ask too many stupid questions in class because you do wanna appear to be confident, but there are ways to find out. There are ways to utilize your resources in order to help with that. Of course you don't want to give in to this imposter syndrome that everybody feels at some point in graduate school. That sense that everybody else knows something that you don't or that you're not as well prepared as you should be. Take that as a signal, one of things to work on. But also as a signal that really, you know, other people are feeling the same way and often they're putting their best foot forward and maybe their best foot is a little different than what your best foot is, but don't confuse that for being inferior or less than. So I offer you Jamie's story as a cautionary tale. Difficult things will happen. Relationships are hard. We misinterpret things. Emotions are all tied up in graduate school. If it were easy, everyone would do it. I think a lot of times we pretend like the emotional part is not there. Another wonderful thing is that we have Rackham here to support. I have been involved with lots of Rackham programs over the years. My husband, Larry, who is on the fourth floor, were, oh, he's in the back. There's my husband, Larry. He came back to hear me. They're here to help you. We have a whole Office of Graduate Students success here to help you to work through some of these issues and to sometimes just be a sounding board. So I encourage you all to use those resources. So as everyone has said, take full advantage of what you have here, what there is to offer in terms of academics, opportunities to collaborate, outstanding faculty and staff, and fun. So I picked up a husband in graduate school, which was really nice. You can, too, but I also made lots of friends who are lifelong friends. I also remain in contact with my advisors. I also remain in contact with my student advisies. So this is not a time to pause, put life on pause, but rather to embrace it and to think about how this is really a starting point of new relationships and so much excitement to come. So happy first day of school. I hope you're as excited as I am. It's an honor to be here to talk to you today. So congratulations on making the best decision of your life and go blue.