Huh. The first grad student I ever had is retiring this fall. That makes me sound a lot older than I actually am.


(Backstory: she is about 15 years older than I am, came back to college after the various life-stuff (marriage, kids, divorce, career, marriage to the guy she probably should have originally married...) happened. She earned her Master's working on a project with me (probably technically not-legally by school standards; I was not yet tenured at the time I chaired her committee but they let it slide). We then hired her on as a FTE instructor and she's served us well for several years. But now she's a grandma, her husband is (finally) retiring for-real, and I guess she has decided it's time to call the career quits. It's a LITTLE sad because I regarded her as a friend and this is her last semester here, but it's a lot better for someone to retire because they WANT to than because they HAVE to - I know a person who had to quit teaching after developing a horrible medical problem that rendered teaching too difficult).

I will say I was concerned at first (she was cleaning out her office today and gave me a bunch of plant identification books I didn't already own) because I thought something had happened and she was leaving THIS semester (either a health thing or a "whoops, we have no money for the FTE people" thing). But it turned out that she was doing some initial cleaning when she had time. (Unlike what I'd do - wait until the last week of employment, freak out that my office had to be empty, pack the stuff I really wanted and then ask students to scavengerize whatever they wanted out of what was left)