This was the first graduation ceremony I attended in America.  It happened to be mine!  I didn’t know it was a big deal in America, until several years later when I saw signboards in front of houses, balloons and parties for even kids graduating high school.  All I knew during my 4 years until then was the route from my apartment to the University and to my son’s elementary school besides a beautiful park by the river, which I  had accidentally found.  

This wasn’t a high school graduation or even an undergrad degree, not even my first graduate degree but a 2^nd doctoral degree in the United States.  The first graduate degree I obtained was in India, a medical doctoral degree almost 8 years ago.  I vividly remember that Mom was there then! She was so proud of me that she did not  even mind showing up unashamed, with a scarf on her head in a crowd of young doctors and their families.  She was out   for the first time publicly, almost bald, after a yearlong chemotherapy for stage three ovarian cancer.  Dad’s best friend and his son whom he had invited  had travelled  350 kilometres from Bangalore to Chennai to attend my graduation. I have seen this friend of dad show up in good times and the bad ones, like a true friend.  Dad must have been beaming proudly somewhere in their midst, as his only daughter finally became the first graduate in his family.   Dad was brilliant but he had dropped out of graduate college with a major in Physics, in the final year as he luckily qualified for a sought-after job in the 70s. I recollect that all  my friends were wearing expensive bright silk sarees and clicking photographs before and after the ceremony. There was laughter of all sorts, giggles, smiles and screams, as all of us culminated our 5 ½ years journey as medical students to become fully licensed physicians to practice anywhere in India.  A proud moment for the parents that were there!

But this PhD graduation ceremony was so different.  There was no family, no friends. Well, I stand corrected. One friend and well-wisher happened to make it.   Becky.  I reason I almost forgot to classify her as my friend is because, she was more my 6 year old son’s friend than mine!

 Becky lived opposite to my son’s kindergarten elementary school, as a caregiver to an older woman, in a small room at the back of a decently sized home just beside the garage.  Our first encounter was a divine appointment I should say because she stormed toward me to sternly warn me not to park in front of the driveway and ended up inviting me to church that Sunday.  Whenever I dropped my little one off to school, I had no time to rush off to my university and waste time by pulling into the school parking lot.  Guilty as charged by Becky, I agree.   Everyday was a roller coaster ride as a single mom braving to do a PhD in a foreign country, with the  quick bath, breakfast, backpack packing, kindergarten homework, prepping lunchbox in addition to planning my experiments, reading published manuscripts and existing literature of scientists who have spent a lifetime to add one line to medical textbooks, so that I can come up with something new to find as a hypothesis for my PhD thesis was a daunting task to a young graduate student.  Becky immediately softened when I told her my situation, and we soon became friends.  I was the last mom to drop off and also the last mom to pick up my son most days from day care because I couldn’t predict when my experiment would end   or stop an electrophoresis gel that has been running for a few hours just to ruin it in the last 10 minutes.  I would call Becky and ask her to pick up my son and keep him for a few minutes until I made it to his school parking lot.  She not only babysat my little one for free  but took him to her tiny room where he would rummage her refrigerator and empty her cranberry juice cartons.  Becky was always neatly dressed for church with a little pink lipstick smothered on her thin lips that brightened up her slightly wrinkled face.    You could never guess she lived on very little until you peeked into her little room, but the room in her heart was so big to accommodate a single mom and her kid from a foreign land she had never visited.  I always wondered how easy my journey would have been if my own mom was there living with me in America.  Becky filled a big part of that void throughout my entire gradschool.  

Of course, by now you would have guessed that I had to invite Becky to my graduation ceremony!  She came in with a bright red sweater with a colorful balloon that said, ‘Congrats grad’.  More than me the balloon made my son so happy, a graduation gift that lifted my spirits.   I am privileged to have my son for the graduation ceremony because Becky graced the occasion of an epitome moment where they conferred a hard-earned PhD after 4 years. Yes ….a very long  four years, it seemed like.

As I was watching Becky and my son in the audience from my graduation line, I also realized I was at the end of a very long queue of young people graduating that day.  There were couple of dozens of bachelor degree candidates and then Master’s degree students, in health and health related fields .  What surprised me was that all the MD candidates were in the front of the line ahead of me and my fellow PhD graduates.  I knew they were MD graduates, because most of them were my students when I worked as a part time faculty instructor in Human anatomy 4 years ago. ( Yeah, I know! Crazy me, right? As if I didn’t have my plate full already!).

Just then one of my Physiology Professors walked past me and I asked Dr. Dana the one question that was bothering me the whole time. “Why are the PhD candidates standing behind the MD candidates?  Isn’t MD the higher degree?  She smiled and said, “June, you are getting your PhD without even knowing that it is the highest degree in the world?!” She chuckled.  Well, I didn’t!   How could I be so naïve wanting to work passionately just to find a solution for infertility, empathizing with a couple who couldn’t conceive while I was practicing in India? Duh!

It certainly would have helped to know this information, during all these 4 years when there was a lot of sweat and blood going into the making of this doctoral candidate.   Retrospectively it made sense! PhD’s had to find something new that no one had found in the world, up until then.  Tall order!  It is your own unique contribution to the world.  However, in order to find something new you had to know everything that has been already done, and understand it all to find something exquisite, unique, that contributes to Science.  That way someone else can build something on what you have found in the future to perhaps a cure for cancer or a drug to treat a disease or better understand the functioning of the human body, the million molecules that make us, us.  

Twenty years later, today, I realize that we pursue life with that same kind of ignorance.  We work so hard in life to achieve success defined by each one of us in our own terms, based on our upbringing, on what our friends tell us, or the motivational gurus instill in our heads.  A beautiful house by the lake, a Tesla or a Lamborghini for a drive, an enviable multifigure job, a great lifestyle of friends, party, exotic vactions and what not.  Is this success in your eyes?   Or is it meant to be success in your parents eyes, spouse’s  or your friends eyes?  This so called SUCCESS shifts from one peak to another, a higher one, a loftier one, as you navigate your course in  life. Let us try it.  Define Success now (for you).  Can you? Is it the same definition when you were ten, or in your 20s versus your 30s , 40s, 60s and 80s.  What if you do not make till 80? What if you didn’t make it to that ultimate peak moment that you dreamt of – at your ripe retirement age, with your kids and grandkids and best friends on your own Yacht. Life is but a breath away!

 A success to an architect is if the home he builds withstands the test of time, under harsh weather and perhaps continues to stand after an earthquake.  Tesla is a success for the geniuses who built it if it can supercharge and run on electricity without fuel. They were designed with a purpose in mind.  Did you know that your Architect designed you with one thing in mind.  To worship Him for All that He is, with all that you are, while you are still here because He made you in His Image.  You are an unique piece of creation.  Your user manual, the unique talents installed in you, the ingenuity incorporated in your software and the masterpiece that you are today, was formed from dust with a final blow of His breath into you- this is unfathomable to the human mind. In a crucial pivotal experiment during my post doctoral work, I found something under a confocal microscope, that was never discovered  before which was cutting edge in the Endocrinology field at that time and I heard God whisper “June, you just found this, huh?   I made it a million years ago”.

 Your ignition to your success is in your connection to your Creator, each day, everyday and every moment.   You don’t want to graduate on the last day of your life without knowing what title and what capacity you had to have been operating in during the span of your lifetime.  You were designed to operate as the “Daughter” and “Son” of the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, an Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent God.  You do not have to come to end of life and realize on the last day of your life that you had missed out  on having an intimate relationship with your heavenly Father,  who was to reveal to you  the roadmap to your success, your entitlement,  the greatness  he had called you for, the lives he designed for you to serve, the amazing things he wanted you to have that he had so meticulously planned and purposed for your life before the beginning of time. Remember you came with nothing and will leave with nothing.  Success is living out the will of your Creator.  Success is living each day on earth according to His purpose on what you were designed to be.   Your key to success comes from tuning into the frequency of His Voice and plugging into His Word to empower your life. with His promises.   And when you finally graduate from here, standing in line having completed His calling on your life, your Heavenly dad will be so proud of you!