When graduate students Gisele Calderon and Shannon Carter found out, along with the rest of Rice University, that the 2020 commencement would be postponed due to the coronavirus, it took some wind out of their sails.
After six long years of demanding work, the Ph.D. candidates had been excited to receive their doctoral hoods on stage in front of friends and family and toast their newly amended names: “To Dr. Calderon!” “To Dr. Carter!”
So when it became clear a traditional graduation party wouldn’t be happening, the two best friends planned their own socially distanced celebration: a proudly unconventional commemoration, in the spirit of their alma mater.
#PhinisheD our #RUnconventionalGraduation right at home with a Rice Loop, bringing our grand total to 31mi in 24h!! I've cherished countless runs around this stunning campus, sharing successes and setbacks of grad school with the lifelong friends I made at @RiceUniversity👩🎓👭👩🔬😭 pic.twitter.com/ZwYPeybmg6
— Shannon Carter (@shan_k_carter) May 16, 2020
That’s how Calderon and Carter ended up running 31 miles in 24 hours: five miles for each year of their Ph.D. studies, plus a final mile that took them into the heart of campus, with breaks in between. They started their first of six five-mile segments at 8 p.m. May 15 and finished the 31 miles at 5 p.m. May 16: the day of commencement.
The run took the pair across Houston and ended outside of Valhalla. Both Calderon and Carter previously co-managed the graduate student pub for a year and had been serving as bartenders before the COVID-19 shutdown.
They popped a bottle of sparkling wine in the otherwise deserted commons outside and celebrated by posting photos to Twitter with the hashtag #RUnconventionalGraduation. It was the last in a series of Twitter updates that tracked their journey throughout the day.
“Shannon should get all the credit for the hashtag,” said Calderon, who received her doctorate in bioengineering and biomedical engineering and is now working at Baylor College of Medicine as a research associate.
“Obviously everything ‘unconventional’ is Rice, including graduation this year,” said Carter, who received her doctorate is in ecology and evolutionary biology and now works as a data scientist at January Advisors. “So we just added the R and made it ‘RUnconventional.’”
Each of the six routes was chosen for a reason — one to commemorate the time they ran the Houston Marathon, another along their daily commute — as were each of the six Rice T-shirts they wore, one for each leg.
There were the Rice cycling and triathlon club shirts, the Valhalla and Graduate Student Association shirts — even the original T-shirts they were wearing when they met as first-year grad students playing powderpuff football during their third week at Rice. The two traded off carrying a football on the first leg of their 31-mile run to mark the memory.
@volker_rudolf would be proud-- paused this run for a amphibian lesson! Tons of Gulf Coast toad mating pairs in a roadside ditch. I spent many hours scouring such ditches during my dissertation #gradpole #ithoppened #imafroggindoctor pic.twitter.com/SGNbvAKOjh
— Shannon Carter (@shan_k_carter) May 16, 2020
Calderon and Carter both chose Rice for its close-knit graduate student community as much as its academics. The school’s reputation for fostering connections across departments made it easier for each of them to come to a brand-new campus — Calderon from Tulane University, Carter from Baylor University.
“What's unique about Rice is that you have the opportunity to meet people out of your own department,” Calderon said, as Carter nodded in agreement.
“I don't think at any other university we would have met, but Rice fosters such a vibrant community with the extracurricular activities and things like powderpuff,” Carter said.
And, of course, there’s Valhalla, where their #RUnconventionalGraduation ended.
It's impossible to imagine my time at Rice without @g_caldero by my side. Though today wasn't what we'd planned, I'm delighted we got to mark the day in a way that celebrates our exceptional friendship and our specific and unique experience at @RiceUniversity 👭👩🎓👩🔬🚴♀️🏃🏼♀️ #PhDone pic.twitter.com/ITXcHQ43n6
— Shannon Carter (@shan_k_carter) May 17, 2020
“The core of the reason why the Rice graduate student community is so strong is because it has a physical space like Valhalla where you can go with your class after work and have a happy hour — people would always be there,” Carter said. “That’s not trivial at all.”
Neither Calderon nor Carter took a break after their #RUnconventionalGraduation and they’re back to running their regular routes. But much like their six years of grad school, they aren’t planning a repeat of the 31-mile route any time in the future.
“I will definitely look back on it really fondly,” Carter said. “I don't know that I want to recreate it.”
“Yeah, Ph.D. life has some rough spots but also a lot of treasured moments, and then just getting through it — I mean, there's a sense of achievement that I don't know you can find many parallels to,” Calderon said. “And it's made doable because of the friendships that we make along the way."