The Class of 1977
Forever Undaunted!
The Alumnae Achievement Awards, February 10, 2006
Our classmate Persis Drell was honored.
Scroll down to see her remarks and a toast made by our class president.
Persis Drell (first row, center) at the Alumnae Achievement Awards dinner with classmates (from lower left: Mary Carten Driscoll, Laura Hussong Kole, Flory Papageorge Denhard, Ginny Donahue King, Sarah Hosmer Lemaire, CE '77 unknown. 77ers missing from photo but also at the dinner: Mary Greene Horvath, Phyllis Douglas.
Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award Acceptance
by Persis S. Drell, Alumnae Achievement Award Recipient, 2006
I grew up a lot between the ages of 17 and 21, and I feel very fortunate that I spent those years at Wellesley. I benefited greatly from my time here. It is a tremendous pleasure to be back and to be honored in this way.
Because those were such formative years, it is hard for me to find a part of my life that does not bear the Wellesley imprint in some way. However three things stand out as particularly important aspects of my Wellesley education.
I am a physicist because I came to Wellesley. I am a physicist because in the second semester of my freshman year I walked into a class taught by Phyllis Fleming. I had loathed physics in high school and came to Wellesley with an idea of majoring in math. I suffer the burden of having a father in physics and many people try to attribute my career choice to my father’s influence. My father never particularly encouraged me to go into physics and I had no desire to follow in his footsteps. However he did advise me that I would be a better mathematician if I took some introductory physics and I heeded that advice.
Freshman mechanics did not particularly engage me. However a classmate recommended that I take a course from Miss Fleming and so I walked into Modern Physics in January of 1974 and fell in love. The topics covered in that course, quantum mechanics and particle physics, are still my favorite physics topics both in teaching and in research.
I had many other great teachers at Wellesley and I still cherish and draw on what I learned here.
Colleges and Universities differ from each other in how they balance their commitment to undergraduate teaching versus research. Wellesley has always been committed to (and delivered on) excellence in teaching to a degree that far exceeds any other institution that I am familiar with. The faculty I took courses from at Wellesley were dedicated to the intellectual growth of their students. The other institutions I know well, UC Berkeley, Cornell and Stanford, have competing priorities in their graduate programs and larger research programs, in addition to undergraduate education. At those institutions, I have not seen the dedication to teaching and the emphasis on the quality of undergraduate education that Wellesley has and I believe Wellesley students benefit enormously from that focus.
The second aspect of my Wellesley education that has had fundamental and lasting importance to me, but the direct influence is more difficult to articulate clearly, is that Wellesley was, and remains to this day, a women’s college. I was not very mature as a freshman and most of my high school friends had been boys from my math class. In retrospect I realize I had very few girl friends at that time. I believe I carried a prejudice that, at least in scientific fields, boys were intellectually superior.
I grew up at Wellesley. I learned to respect other women for their intellectual capabilities in all fields including science. I learned to form friendships with women that transcended any competition. I found role models. For four blissful years I did not see math and physics as male dominated activities. It was wonderful.
Fate can play nasty tricks and when I entered graduate school at Berkeley I was the only woman in my class of 48 in the physics department. I felt well prepared for the academic challenges of graduate school but I found it socially very strange. However it was a more accurate reflection of the profession I was entering. I am now used to being in a field where only 5% of the full Professors are women. I have learned to be comfortable with my conspicuousness and there are times when I recognize it as an asset. I credit Wellesley with giving me the time and the environment to allow me to become comfortable and confident as both a physicist and a woman physicist.
Women have made great strides towards equality in our society in the past 25 years, including in the academic community. However I firmly believe that women’s colleges, as Wellesley has remained, are still essential options for some students. There are still many young women who, like I did, will benefit enormously from the different atmosphere a women’s college offers. It is a place where a young woman can develop confidence in her intellectual abilities without the confusing and complicating social issues that can compete in a coed environment. Teaching physics in a coed atmosphere, as I have, I have seen the women ask fewer questions relative to their male colleagues and on average they seem to lack self confidence relative to their male peers. For many women this is not an impediment but just a different path. However I believe strongly that a woman’s college remains an important educational option and I do not think the need will go away any time soon!
Finally, I cherish the broad liberal arts education I received at Wellesley. Sometimes in my day dreams I think of what it would have been like to have stayed an extra year at Wellesley and in that fantasy, I spend that entire extra year taking English, History, Art History, Music Theory, Italian, …everything but physics and math!
Physics is my chosen field and my profession. My liberal arts education enhances my professional career and is also a source of enormous pleasure. It is a source of recreation and enrichment in my life. I cannot imagine being happy without it. Wellesley did not make me a scholar of history or English or music. But I learned enough to appreciate the subjects, to participate in them as an amateur, and to derive enormous pleasure from the process of engaging with them intellectually.
It is easy and obvious to all how a liberal arts education can benefit a scientific career. Writing and communication skills are essential tools to all of us in the sciences where our funding is all predicated on written grant proposals and we communicate our research progress in oral seminars and written papers. Furthermore, as the scientific enterprise becomes increasingly expensive, we must be able to communicate effectively with the public in general and Washington DC in particular to justify large resources devoted to scientific research. I have also learned that to be successful in management, some elementary psychology is very useful!
What should not be overlooked, however, is that it is just as important that those pursuing a humanities specialization need to be scientifically literate in this day and age. I believe it is important that scientific literacy also be identified as an important goal of a liberal arts education. We all need to understand elementary concepts in probability to differentiate perceived risk from real risk; and quantitative thinking is an essential tool to comprehend our country’s economy, and to engage in the debates surrounding global warming, resource management and global population growth, just to give a few examples.
For me, the great stroke of good fortune was that, as an immature 17 year old, I chose to come to Wellesley. That was a time when many of the traditionally all male Ivy league colleges had recently started admitting women. Women’s colleges were seen as anachronisms from an earlier era. I had narrowed my choices to Princeton and Wellesley. Princeton had only started admitting women a few years before I applied and I was competitive enough to most certainly want to be accepted there. Once accepted, I decided to go to Wellesley.
I did not choose Wellesley over Princeton because I understood the differences between a small liberal arts women’s college and one of the great Ivy league research Universities. My choice was much more dictated by chance.
I visited Princeton on a grey drippy day, and a young freshman woman showed me around, and I’m afraid she was rather a drip. All I can remember of the visit was she kept saying how nice it was to live in co-ed dorms and have boys as friends.
I visited Wellesley on a bright spring day when the sun was shining and the grass was very green. I was shown around by a senior...a very self possessed and poised young woman. This young woman exuded a quiet self confidence that impressed me very much, and when it came down to choosing a college, I chose Wellesley because I wanted to be like her. I don’t think I will ever achieve the poise and self possession of the Wellesley senior of my memory, but the ideal still inspires me!
As an institution, I hope that Wellesley continues, as a women’s college, to pursue excellence in education and teaching, and the ideals of a strong liberal arts education. This will continue to make a Wellesley education every bit as important to the future generations of Wellesley graduates as it has been to me. While future Wellesley students may continue to come to Wellesley for reasons as unformed as mine were, they will continue to leave Wellesley with a breadth of education and a confidence that will inspire then to do great things.
Thank you
Toast to Persis Drell ‘77, Alumnae Achievement Award Dinner
by Mary O'Loughlin Rafferty, 1977 Class President
February 10, 2006
Good evening. I’m Mary O’Loughlin Rafferty, president of the class of ’77, and I am pleased and honored to bring our greetings and congratulations to this great group of honorees.
We’re most appreciative of the great wit and unique voice of Nora Ephron. We’re in awe at the courage, adventurousness and pure macho of Pam Melroy. And we’re so proud and delighted for our brilliant classmate, Persis, who is as special as her name. I can’t even begin to talk about WHAT Persis does -- I never knew there were so many kinds of physics -- but I will try to share a little perspective on HOW.
Classmates remember her smiling face and love of learning. More than one recall thinking that she would be Wellesley’s Nobel Prize winner. However, she was, and as you see today, still is, incredibly grounded and unfazed by her brilliance. We admired her many talents but remember her as friendly, approachable and down to earth.
Even as a freshman Persis was a calm, steady influence for the first floor Crow’s Nest in Severance. She spent her first Thanksgiving on the East coast with her neighbor, our mutual friend, Jane Dowd, who had an effervescent personality and reveled in Boston’s Irish history and politics. Jane and Persis moderated the freshman challenges on their floor and stayed close throughout their years at Wellesley until Jane lost her valiant struggle with cystic fibrosis our senior year.
Persis later wrote to Jane’s mom, “James Welch, the guy I am going to marry, is Irish and I know Jane would be so proud.” One of our classmates, Rev. Diane Harvey, who Persis became friendly with at UC Berkeley, married them. So, after having told her Pomeroy suitemates that she would be the last to marry, Persis was actually the first of the group to have children. And that seems fitting, since friends remember her as very family oriented. I was in touch with Persis at the time of her appointment at Stanford and although she would miss her work and colleagues at Cornell, and was excited about the professional challenges ahead, she was most pleased to be heading home, so she and her family could be closer to her parents.
Classmates recall Persis’ talents in acting and music which may not be known to her professional colleagues. She held many major roles in Shakespeare Society productions and was considered the heart and soul of the organization. A fellow Shakespeare member says, “She is one of those rare persons that truly possessed a ‘sunny disposition, come what may.’ She was an active leader and was ever striving to find the common ground among us.”
One classmate remembers her own dad happily anticipating the opportunity to play four hands with Persis on the piano in the Severance Living Room whenever he visited. Another, who teaches high school, said, “I wish we could bottle up some of what she brought to Wellesley and administer it to today's students. Persis loved physics, and look where it has taken her, following her heart!”
So, as you can see, many sent greetings and wished they could be here to toast you on this happy occasion.
‘77 Forever Undaunted! See you in Sweden!
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