There's a story behind my decision to go
back to graduate school. I had an Uncle
Leo who died at close to a hundred and
at his funeral a few years ago my
brother who is a couple of years older than I turned to me and said you know if I live
as long as Leo I've got about 36 years left
in my life and what am I gonna do...that
started me to thinking I had been a
trombone player a good portion of my adult
life but couldn't play anymore because
of hearing loss, so I started to think
about what abilities I had and what other
opportunities there would be for me
in the future...
My name is Jon Taylor, and I got my PhD in Developmental Psychology at the Graduate Center...
The Graduate Center is and CUNY I
should say is a very unique place
They are more committed to diversity I
think than other places and diversity is
often spoken about with respect to
ethnicity, nationality, gender—rarely is
age included in that diversity and yet
if you think about why diversity is
important in education that it's to
expose people to different perspectives
and then that's part of the educational
accomplishment and
the Graduate Center was willing to
consider a student who was 61 applying
for a graduate program whereas the other
programs I applied to work or simply not
three of them wouldn't even talk to me
the other one interviewed me and said
well you've been out of school too long
which I thought was code for you're too old...I think initially when I arrived here
there may have been a little bewilderment
on some people's part...a little
feeling out to see who I was and what I
was going to do here both on the part of the
faculty and the students I think that
the faculty and the students quickly saw
that I was actually committed to what I
was doing...I was working very hard and
and they treated me with respect. The
faculty were very supportive about my
hearing loss they referred me to people
at the GC who might be able to help me...
the students were wonderful. I don't
think they were if you had added up the age
of any two students in my program that
it had added up to my age but they
were all very accepting, and I learned
a lot from them and similarly I think
that they were able to learn something
from my perspectives from my greater
years of experience...while i was a
graduate student here I had a graduate
assistantship at Hunter. My dissertation was actually...required many of the same skills and
I am using at Hunter and was related to the same area looking at access to New York
City's elite specialized high schools
like Bronx Science, Stuyvesant high school
and looking at the admissions tests and
the validity of the admissions tests as
it might relate to the great under
representation of minorities and girls...
and I believe that
education is a very important way to
maybe achieve more equality in America,
so that's the type of research I was
actually interested in and it's worked out
well for me...
