Many moms take pictures with their newborns, but one Florida Ph.D. student took a photo with a different kind of "baby": her five-chapter dissertation.
Eve Humphrey completed her doctorate program at Florida State University after working toward her Ph.D. in Biology for six years. After turning in her dissertation, which took years of research to complete, she wanted to find a way to celebrate.
"I’m not super celebratory, but I wanted to do something that was fun," Humphrey said. "Science can be very straight forward and I wanted to do something to commemorate what I did and take a moment to be proud of myself."
Humphrey often joked throughout her doctorate program that her dissertation was her "baby" because of all the hard work, lack of sleep, back pain from sitting in front of her computer and weight gain from stress eating. Thinking about these factors, she recruited her photographer friend Korie Mitchell and decided to make a picture-perfect memory of her accomplishment.
Humphrey and Mitchell did a "newborn" photoshoot of Humphrey holding her dissertation as her baby. Humphrey created a sign with the typical "baby" milestones that people celebrate and even placed her dissertation in a baby chair.
The photos were posted to Facebook with a caption that read, "Six years ago, I started on a journey and I didn’t know how hard it would be to finish. I gained weight, I experienced back pain, I cried a lot … was I pregnant," Humphrey wrote on her Facebook post with the pictures. "So I would like to introduce toy all to my creation, 6 years of pushing and it gave me a new name. Hi, I’m Dr. Eve Humphrey, PhD."
Humphrey thought it was would be a funny way to celebrate getting her doctorate and something that would make her friends and family laugh. She had no idea that it would be shared over 10,000 times on Facebook.
"I was like, 'What the heck?'" Humphrey said. "My husband told me it had a ton of 'likes' and then it started being shared by people I didn’t know. I guess I get it, though, because that’s something I would crack up at and share."
Humphrey is now working at Syracuse University in a faculty position doing disciplined-based education research. She will return to Florida State in December to walk at her graduation.
