On Monday night, Lee Grodin took a short break from her thesis and spent some time procrastinating with me at the Argus office eating sushi from Japanica and modeling her hip sunglasses. She is totally photogenic by the way. She’s also not letting her thesis totally consume her, still has time for plenty of other activites. Remember those bake sales outside of the Campus Center last week? Whose rice-crispy treats do you think those were? She’s funny, charismatic, entertaining (I mean you have to be to get Wes students out of their clothes week after week…umm…for art’s sake). She’s this week’s WesCeleb!
MB: Is it safe to talk about your thesis?
LG: It’s due Wednesday!
MB: How are you feeling about it at this point?
LG: I loved doing a thesis. It’s definitely been a last push. I am running a little low on sleep and I’ve definitely missed a few classes. But I’m almost done. And I’m looking forward to putting my carrel to better uses.
MB: Do you get to keep your carrel until the end of the year?
LG: No. They would know that we’d all be up to no good if we had a carrel and no thesis to work on. I’ve resorted to a mobile carrel as of late. The library has been closing on me. Especially during spring break when it was closing at 5 p.m. I moved into my living room, and that was pretty good.
MB: What’s your thesis on?
LG: Malaria control in West Africa. We currently have the technology (i.e., draining swamps) to prevent malaria outbreaks, and my thesis examines why control policies have failed in West Africa. It ties together a lot the subjects I have studied at Wesleyan. I also went abroad to Cameroon in the fall of 2003. I didn’t catch malaria on the trip, but other people [in the program did] including Will [Gordon ’05]. Going abroad I saw how prevalent malaria is in West Africa. It was cool to come back to Wesleyan and intellectualize it. Do you know what is horrible about theses?
MB: Tell me.
LG: That nobody thinks to remember that we are graduating in a few weeks. I didn’t even realize that the snow had melted. But there is great camaraderie; we all speak the same garbled language and keep the same crazy hours. And if I had known that I was going to have so many dreams about my thesis, I probably would have chosen something lighter to study than malaria, like the history of wine in France.
MB: What department are you doing your thesis under?
LG: Science in Society, not and.
MB: Do you find that most people mix up the name of the major?
LG: Yeah, it’s one of those Wesleyan-Wellesley mix-ups. It’s funny, because in Cameroon, one of the first things you do when you meet the chief of a village is say what you are studying. Everyone else in the program was studying ordinary subjects like psychology and biology, and all I got was a blank look when I explained that I was studying science in society.
MB: So you were also involved in the Paul Farmer event last week?
LG: Teek [Pratik Thaker ’05] and I did a lot of bake sales and fundraisers. It’s not the easiest thing to get him on campus. We wanted to raise money for the organization he co-founded. We held bake sales that week and received donations from parents, families and friends. But the bake sales raised the most. My house Pine Street became a bakery. The rice- crispy treats we produced were kind of intense.
MB: Speaking of food you were also involved in F.O.R.C. [Food Recovery Coalition]?
LG: Ever since I started F.O.R.C., I always misspell fork. Basically, I work at Pi and I saw that food was being thrown out every night and it was kind of lame. We had some trouble getting dining services to agree (and a lot of legal paper work to deal with), but we eventually got permission to pack up the leftover food at the end of each night, and making runs to the Eddy Shelter and an alternative incarceration center in Middletown. It feels really good, and it was good to see how Wesleyan supported that initiative. You can really start anything at this school.
MB: What other activities are you involved in?
LG: The Equestrian Team. It’s an under appreciated club on this campus. It’s fantastic, though, and a great group. When we go up to the stables, it’s like a different world. Two funny things about the stables: the first is that the trainer is the most flamboyant and yet happily married heterosexual ever. The other funny thing is that there is this horse Jake who is this little gelding [translated: a castrated horse] that wears a pink halter and hangs out with all the mares [that, is female horses]. I’m not going to lie, he has mounted some of the mares during jumping exercises. But the team has good riders this year.
MB: And you also run the Drawing Guild?
LG: It is an open studio space from 3-6 p.m. on Saturday in the drawing studios. It’s a club, so we get WSA funding to hire nude models and art supplies. It’s a good chance for students to get into classes to get into the art world.
MB: And the nude models are Wesleyan students?
LG: Almost always they are, which is interesting because people often have trouble getting models. But we put out fliers a week in advance, and we get plenty of replies of people wanting to model. It’s a really high paying jo—15 an hour. That’s a good thing about Wesleyan: people are willing to take off their clothes. They shed their clothes anyway. It’s just a matter of paying them to come to the studio.