Professor looks to past for advice on the future

Christopher Troise Guest Writer

The Class of 2011 officially began its academic careers with Fall Convocation. On Sept. 5, Professor of Anthropology Lucille Johnson joined the rest of the College community in welcoming the freshmen and bolstering the new senior class. In her convocation speech, “Serendipity and Circumstance in Shaping a Career,” Johnson analyzed her career to determined how its different elements led her to where she is now.

Johnson discussed how “accepting that circumstances change” can make one’s career more interesting and allow one to go in new directions. She spoke of this theme in hopes of striking a chord with freshman as they begin their undergraduate journeys, as well as resonate with seniors whose time at Vassar is winding down.

During her own undergraduate career, Johnson realized that she did not like her major, and after reading about other subjects she discovered anthropology. Thus, Johnson strongly encouraged freshmen to take advantage of the classes at Vassar: to take courses that are different from those they took in high school as well as those courses that they think they may not like.

High school courses are different from college offerings, she said, and a freshman may assume that a subject that didn’t interest them before will never interest them. Not so, emphasized Johnson, who pointed to her own life as an example.

“Make sure to look through the entire catalogue because the saddest thing in the world is a senior who discovers a class in women’s studies and they just never got down to that part of the alphabet,” Johnson said. “Don’t think that you know what you want to study or what you want to be when you’re a first semester freshman because it’s going to change. And if it doesn’t you’ll probably be unhappy with it 10 years out.”

Johnson has studied archaeological sites in New York, Alaska, Idaho, Egypt, Chile and Peru. Ever since she began working at Vassar in 1973, she has taken students with her on field work study. This past summer, she worked with Vassar students to analyze the materials from Denning’s Point that she had excavated in the summers of 2005 and 2006.

Not only has her journey brought her to anthropology, it has also helped her forge relationships with students. Perhaps one of the greatest things about working at Vassar, Johnson said, is the ability to share her own experiences with students finding a way into their own.

According to Johnson, we are often faced with many choices and our decisions can lead us in many directions. Some decisions we make are carefully thought out, while others are shaped by “serendipity and circumstance,” thus there is not one divergence, but many.

Johnson pointed to Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as being a profound example of that idea, one useful for students to keep in mind at this crucial point in life: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”