RE: The (long) future of paleontology

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> Richard W. Travsky
>
> On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 Ken.Carpenter@dmns.org wrote:
> > I know of at least one graduate student at the U. of
> > California Berkeley who had already been a graduate student for 20 years
> > when I met the person in the late 1970s. The rigid deadlines became a
> > way of forcing students to finish something they started and to move on
> > in life. Ken
>
> I'm reminded of the Roger Zelazny story about the fellow at college whose
> (deceased) father left him access to the inheritance so long as he was in
> college - so he stopped one credit short of every program at the
> university...

A not-entirely fictional character... Zelazny founded the Society of Amber at 
Johns Hopkins in the 1970s; by the late 1970s/early
1980s it had mutated into the Hopkins Science Fiction Association (of which I 
was eventually president while I was an undergrad). I
never met the eternal student in question, but he had written our by-laws and 
such, and he had still been a student just a year or
two before I arrived!

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
        Senior Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
        Mailing Address:
                Building 237, Room 1117
                College Park, MD  20742

http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796