Dr. Tanner

On Wednesday morning I had my final defense, the last requirement left in order to complete my Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree. At the end of the defense, I was escorted me out of the room so that my committee could deliberate. After a few minutes the door opened and my committee chair called out, "Dr. Tanner?"

As I preceded to shake the hands of all of my congratulatory committee members, I had the strangest feeling: "So that's it?" Now I know it's been a long road - I've spent nine years in college, years seven, eight, and nine here at Michigan, during which time I've been plenty busy (especially this semester) - but at that moment I somehow didn't feel like I could possibly be a doctor yet. Aren't you supposed to spend years and years toiling away at a dissertation before you finally collapse just over the finish line? Guess I shouldn't complain about that. One thing that I'm really not complaining about - I have somehow managed to get all the way through a doctoral degree without ever taking out any loans or accruing any debt. That's a major, major blessing that I will no doubt appreciate more and more as time passes.

Over the last three years I have shared an office with five or six other doctoral students who are also Graduate Student Instructors. When I first got to Michigan in August 2007, a sage old doctoral student was showing me the ropes and she stressed the importance of staking a claim on a good office shelf. I didn't have anything to stash on the shelf at the time, so I declared my dibs with a little yellow post-it note. Yesterday I cleaned out all of the books from my shelf and saw that the post-it note was still there after three years:

It seemed a proper epitaph, so I left it there. In the fall some new doctoral student will walk in the office, see a piece of prime shelf real estate, think "Who the crap is Brian Tanner?" and rip my memorial down. It's okay though - I left a more permanent memorial (using my nom de origami) out in front of the Walgreen Drama Center:

Too bad that now I can't change it to "Dr. BET."