“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
A Harvard graduate student is enrolled in two doctoral programs and raising newborn twins.
Talia Gillis has such a calm, friendly presence you’d never guess that she’s undertaking two doctoral programs while pregnant with twins and running around after a toddler at home.
“Did I underestimate the amount of work it would take?” she asked rhetorically. “Yes, probably. But it has been fantastic.”
Gillis recognizes that she’s an outlier. “It’s not very common for women to have kids in the economics graduate program, and two is odd, but three is kind of crazy,” she said in early February. “It took a long time to reconcile my self-concern as a graduate student and the fact that I was going to have twins, but a lot of people have been very supportive.”
Born in London, Gillis moved with her family to Australia when she was an infant, and then to Israel when she was around 8. It was at Israel’s Hebrew University that she first studied law and economics as an undergraduate, before moving to Oxford for a graduate law degree. She then came to Harvard six years ago to get an S.J.D. in law and economics, deciding soon after to add a Ph.D. in business economics with a focus on household finance and behavioral economics.
“With behavioral economics, it takes one to know one,” she explained with a laugh, adding that “introspection about how I was running my finances and spending money really had an initial appeal for going into behavioral economics and household finance.”
Tonight at Walmart I saw a little boy ask a little girl if he could hug her because he liked her sweater. The girl (these kids looked to be about 5, MAYBE 6) said no, so the boy said “okay. I like your sweater. Bye.” And then ran back to his parents.
He said to his Dad “I didn’t hug her because she said no, but I told her I liked her sweater!” And his dad said “Cool buddy!” And they went on with their shopping trip.
If a small child understands the ‘complex’ concept of consent, and the meaning of the word ‘no’, then so should everyone else.
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