Spring is the time in the United States when young people who are planning their future are participating in a rite of passage – commencement exercises at thousands of colleges, universities and other tertiary level educational institutions.
“They are called commencement because they signal the beginning of a new phase of a young person’s life,” explained Dr Carlos Russell, a retired professor of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, CUNY. “It’s an exciting time for young people, full of anticipation.”
That’s certainly the case for Arianne S. Watson, a Bajan-New Yorker who was born in Brooklyn but was raised in Queens. She considers herself every bit a daughter of the soil of Barbados.
But if graduations are so commonplace at this time of the year, involving millions of students in the 50 states what makes Arianne’s story so compelling and therefore worth telling is that the young woman, not yet 22 years old, was awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the same commencement ceremony of the State University at Albany in the New York state capital. Actually, she was a student in a combined bachelor’s and master’s programme in Sociology.
While more than 1 000 State University students received either a bachelor’s, master’s or a PhD degree, the Bajan was the only one to be awarded two of them at once. After about four years of hitting the books, often until the wee hours of the morning, conducting research, writing papers and helping to teach a course in race and ethnicity at the university, the daughter of William and Carolyn Watson must now decide if she will take a year or two off from studying before pursuing her doctorate in sociology with a focus on criminology and inter-sectionality.
“I want to work on the PhD. But I have to decide whether I am going to work for a year and then return to school or go straight ahead with my studies for the doctorate,” Arianne said. “I want to teach and become a university professor or to be a researcher. That’s my goal.”
When Russell, a professor emeritus of political science within the CUNY system heard about Arianne’s accomplishments and her background, he said it was clear she was a brilliant student.
“There are not many university programmes that offer such a duality of a bachelor’s and a master’s,” Professor Russell explained. “Admittance into them indicates that the students who are chosen are brilliant, disciplined, goal-oriented and have a mission. In that sense, graduating that way from those schools is unusual.”
Actually, Arianne, the granddaughter of Gwendolyn Rouse in Barbados and Adelle Watson in New York City began doing university level work even before leaving high school, hence her ability to start her college career ahead of most of her peers at SUNY in Albany, reducing the time she spent on campus and completing the course work for both degrees in such a short space of time.
“It was a pretty intense period of study which enabled me to take a comprehensive look at people,” she told the SUNDAY SUN in New York.
“It is very important to look at people from different inter-sections, whether they are from the United States, the Caribbean or Africa if they are Black. I am a product of two Bajans but being in the United States I am an ‘American.’ However, I define myself as a West Indian child because it’s the only thing that has shaped my thinking. My parents are West Indians and all of my friends in high school were West Indians. In addition, I have lived in an area in Queens which is like an ethnic enclave of people from the Caribbean. Still, I see myself as a Bajan, of course.”
That’s understandable too because she grew up in what was essentially a Bajan home in New York with the various dishes, regular church attendance and an emphasis on educational attainment.
A regular visitor to Barbados, Arianne may not have acquired a passion for cou-cou or conkies, Bajan staples, but everything else comes naturally.“I thoroughly enjoy Barbados,” she said.
