today my anthro professor said something kindof really beautiful:
“you all have a little bit of ‘I want to save the world’ in you, that’s why you’re here, in college. I want you to know that it’s okay if you only save one person, and it’s okay if that person is you”
I feel like a few people I know could stand to read this.
Mary Somerville is the reason for the word ‘scientist.’ A self-taught mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, she was a master of connecting the physical sciences. In 1834, she’d impressed a historian who found himself unable to publicly praise her because the only common description for that sort of scholar was ‘man of science.’ He then coined the term ‘scientist’- but it wasn’t intended to be a gender-neutral noun, it was specifically a reference to Mary Somerville’s expertise. SourceSource 2Source 3