Names are important. Your name (or at least, my name) tells a story about who you are, so it is no surprise that Major Life-changing Events often change our names.

As an example, I will trace the history of my own name, since it’s the one I know best:

When I was born, I was named Katherine Hanley Allen, but called Katie. Katie was my mother’s vision for me: she knew she was going to have a daughter, and that was her daughter’s name. She wanted me to have a long name, though, so she was considering Kathleen, to honor her mother-in-law’s Irish heritage. Several other women in my family were Catherine or Kathryn or Cathryn, though, so she compromised to Katherine, and I was given my grandmother’s maiden name, Hanley, as my middle name.

When I went to college, my name changed—not legally, but through a sequence of accidents I went from being “Katie” to “Kat”. That changed how people interacted with me. My family mostly still calls me “Katie”, or sometimes “Kate” (or, in one inexplicable case, “Katrina”) but my friends, colleagues, and in-laws call me “Kat”. (Some of my colleagues call me “Katherine”, which is in itself a reflection of how we interact—a bit more formally than a very very short name would allow!) Occasionally, a stranger will call me “Kathy”, which automatically loses them some of my respect—it’s not my name, so they lose points.

My name changed again when I married: I appended my husband’s surname to my name, turning mine into a middle name, and became Katherine Hanley Allen Sniffen. It serves to reflect the change in my life: still myself, but now part of a new family.

And now, with the birth of my daughter, there are new names all around. She is named for my great-grandmother Mary Emalene, the only girl of 9, and for Brian’s great-great-aunt Amelia, and for the goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne. But Brian and I get new names, too—we are still ourselves, but we are also “Mommy” and “Daddy”. That may be the most dramatic change of all.

This article in The Boston Globe has some fascinating anecdotes and data on how uncommon it really is to go to college straight out of high school and finish a Bachelor’s degree in four years.

I’m curious to find out more. I wonder how that data changes for science vs. arts. I’d assumed that my many acquaintances from MIT who took more than four years to graduate were the exception—that “most people” manage to graduate even in technical fields in four years. It’s so ingrained an assumption that end up defending my own path through college: “I finished in 8 terms!”, I say, as if not doing so were a stain on my credentials as an engineer or a “good person”.

What I see more and more is that four-year-colleges aren’t, and even when high school graduates push themselves through a program in four years, the ones who went in without passion for a particular career or discipline come out without the skills and passion to succeed. And all this is setting entirely aside the disaster that is college financing—the great majority of those graduates will be struggling under the weight of their college loans for decades after graduation, especially the ones who left with a sheepskin but no passion or marketable skills.

Not that I know what to do about it, when (as the article mentions, and as I’ve seen in recruiting practices at my own company and others) companies are using not only a BS/BA, but minimum GPAs as the first filter in hiring. A Bachelor’s degree has become the new high school diploma—you can get a job without one, but not one that will support a family. So what do we do about changing that culture?

They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.

                <p>via <a href='http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/24/on-the-shortness-of-life-an-introduction-to-seneca/'>Google Reader (559)</a>.</p>

Proving that you don’t need to be modern to have good advice, Seneca has a lot to say on what it means to really live.