On Empathy and Magnanimity

I’m not a person who cries.

Watching “The Notebook”? Dry as a bone. “Old Yeller”? Snoozed right through the heart-shattering end (spoiler alert?). Since childhood, I just have not been altogether emotionally expressive in that particular capacity.

But, every sweeping generalization has its exception.

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When you think of someone studying at Harvard, you probably imagine brooding students perched inside of ivy-suffocated, red brick lofts. I know that when I received my acceptance letter, I imagined cardigans neatly tied around shoulders and a writhing sea of boat shoes. While that culture certainly existed, my personal student experience was vastly different.

Let’s just say that I didn’t have the pleasure of experiencing the full Cambridge treatment. I didn’t come from generations of Ivy League alumni, and I certainly didn’t have a cushy trust fund with parental financial backing. To make the Harvard pipedream a reality? I sold my used 2002 Ford Escape, and took the humble cash payout to the East Coast. Just me, a couple of suitcases, and a smile.

The only residence I could afford was in a Boston suburb, littered with crushed cigarette butts. I lived in the drafty ground-level floor of an old home, converted to a laughable little apartment, bathed in yellow incandescence. Without my car, it took me close to an hour to commute to school, each way, via public transportation. I was lucky enough to find a full-time research position (while being a full-time student – a longstanding theme for me), but the pay was dismal and was barely enough to cover my feeble cost of living.

For the first year at Harvard, I borrowed money from the federal government to pay my tuition for the brutal regimen of sciences. As I geared up to start year two, I got a notice from the financial aid office that my particular program was only eligible for aid for the first year, and that I’d have to cough up a few thousand dollars to continue.

I was devastated. As it was, I was subsisting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and blocks of plasticky cheddar cheese. My electricity had been shut off on multiple occasions due to inability to pay. There was absolutely no way I could put together the tuition needed, especially on short-notice. After a back-breaking year, I was going to have to drop-out and save as much as I could in order to return. But, what would that take? One year? Two? Maybe more?

At work, a couple of days later, someone involved in the IT-side of our research department caught wind of my situation. I don’t remember if I told him, or someone else had. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What I do remember, explicitly, is that he asked me to confer with him in one of our conference rooms. I took a seat, and he slid the cost of my tuition across the glassy finish of a long boardroom table.

I looked up at him, blinking through tear-blurred vision. I told him I absolutely could not accept. He smiled, he insisted, and he explained that he and his wife would be able to recuperate the sum. He went on to explain that he believed I was going to make an impact on humanity, and that finances shouldn’t be a barrier to the education needed to help me get there.

Me, speechless. Still.

When I assured him that I would pay him back, he declined. He told me to “pay it forward to someone else who may need help.”

I’ll spare you the details of me, running to the bank during my lunch break, mopping up my leaking face with the sleeve of my shirt. But, his tremendous selflessness allowed me to enroll in my remaining courses; it allowed me to finish the Harvard program and finish subsequent graduate degrees; it allowed me to manage the science of an entire research program for an innovative start-up company, and then lead all investigator-initiated research for a large cancer center, and then become a think tank member for a pioneer company in the field of neuroscience. If you extrapolate hard enough, it probably contributed to me creating this website, and the blog you’re reading now.

I’m not sure how to wrap this up in a way that does adequate justice to how impactful that moment was. But, I will say two things:

Firstly, if you have the ability to help someone – emotionally, financially, physically, and otherwise – do it. Act out of empathy, always. Without the expectation of recompense.

Secondly, to Richard: I think of that moment often. And you absolutely changed the trajectory of my future in ways that I probably don’t yet understand. There are no words, or gestures, or songs I could sing, that would thoroughly demonstrate how unbelievably appreciative I still am. I want you to know that since your act of kindness, I have made it a point to help those around me with the request that they, too, pay it forward. Every time. Your kindness has been far reaching, and it is actually you who has made an impact on humanity.