And he says, you know, you can pick your topic and you can, I don’t know, you can do whatever you want. He said, it won’t cost you anything, he said, but it will be a huge benefit to me because it’s a kudo for me, it’s stripes on my shoulder. He said, because if I recruit you into our PhD program, he says, it will generate for the university more than $150,000 in benefits. And I laughed and said, “You gotta be kidding.” And he said, “No, because not because we’re doing this for you, ’cause you’re really doing it for us.” He said, “You will be assuming you’re still employed, when you finish this PhD. You will be an employed professional in your demonstrated field. And we can say that you’re employed because of us because of the PhD.” And so I went back literally full-time, part-time, I have no idea how I ever did that for three years, I had to take a minimum of courses. I already had my dissertation topic chosen because I had been doing some field work in Panama, particularly in Panama with Central American agaouti, a ground dwelling rodent. I had done some field observations and it was just a question of formalizing what needed to be done to shape it into a dissertation.
