There’s something really cute when a celebrity graduates from uni. The long gown, the little hat, the roll of paper; I find it all unbearably quaint and lovely.
So, seeing as it’s the first day back at school for many of you, I wanted to offer you a few scholastic role models to inspire you to work harder than ever this semester. Starting with Brian.
10. Brian May
Before he composed ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Fat-bottomed Girls’ and ‘I Want it All’, May was studying reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the Solar System. Then when Queen got huge, he abandoned his study for 36 years, and went back to get his PhD in 2007.
He’s now the
Chancellor at Liverpool John Moores University, and has an asteroid named after him called
532665 Brianmay. You can even read his PhD if you like: it's called 'A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud' (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008) and it’s available at
Amazon for USD $63.96.
9. Natalie Portman
‘When I was in Harvard I smoked weed every day.’ Who can forget Nat's rapped
confession to
Saturday Night Live about how she spent her four-year acting hiatus (excluding the
Star Wars films). She spent the time at uni, completing a bachelor's degree in Psychology at Harvard, and maybe smoking marijuana.
8. Rivers Cuomo
For your enjoyment, the caption to this photo on the
New York Times, is:
After a world tour with Weezer, Rivers Cuomo, 35, moved into an unadorned room in a Harvard dormitory.
FYI he graduated with a degree in English in 2006.
7. Emma Watson
Last September, the 19-year-old
Harry Potter star
began her first year at Brown University, Rhode Island, where a lot of photos were taken of her on her first day wearing a white t-shirt and denim shorts and doing some weird theatresports on the manicured lawn with her fellow students. She is studying English Literature.
6. Jodie Foster
One of Yale's most famous students, Jodie Foster, left Hollywood for four years to get a degree. She graduated in 1984 with a BA in English Literature. She's really cool. I don't have much else to say about Jodie than that, really.
5. Julia Stiles
Mona Lisa Smile was about a bunch of women studying at Wellesley College in 1953. It was a terrible film but it featured lots of excellent hats (not shown) and actresses (two shown), so for that reason I am okay with mentioning it briefly. Julia Stiles played a character who dropped out of uni to become a wife.
Even though, just like her character in the film, Stiles the woman is a woman too, she somehow managed to graduate from uni in 2005, obtaining a degree in Literature from Columbia University. While she was there, she wrote
this column for the
Guardian about feminism.
Now, she's going to be in
The Bell Jar, so we can look forward to heaps more fabulous 1950s collegiate dressing to come.
4. Mayim Bialik
After playing the young Bette Midler in
Beaches, Bialik got her own TV series,
Blossom. She got accepted to both Harvard and Yale, but chose to stay on the West Coast to study at UCLA instead, where she completed her PhD in Neuroscience.
Neuroscience. Amazing.
She is now often described as a ‘
holistic Mom’. I'll let you follow that up in your own time.
3. Dolph Lundgren
Before he made his acting debut in the 1985 James Bond film
A View to a Kill, Lundgren had studied in Sweden and at the University of Sydney, where he earned a Master’s in Chemical Engineering. He had also gone to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a prestigious Fullbright Scholarship. And his IQ is reportedly 160, which is a lot, I think.
But I think you'll find
The Onion describes his academic career so much better than I ever could. Read it on your study break; you'll learn heaps.
2. Lily Cole
The British model and actress 'shocked the press' in 2006 by announcing that she was planning to put her career on hold to enter Cambridge University to study Art History.
'It is quite shocking the amount of interest I got from choosing to go to university. And that people would be surprised that I'd have any incentive to want to learn more. Essentially that's why people are surprised. You have a career, you have money ... why would you? Of course, it doesn't take a very interesting person to realise there are more reasons why you want to study.'
Bravo, Lily. Also, it might be interesting for some of you freshmen to note that her first year wasn't that fun because her
bicycle got stolen, but you'll be happy to know that she is rising above it and her second year is getting a lot better now. Take heart from that.
1. James Franco
After earning a BA in Creative Writing from UCLA, Franco enrolled at Columbia University for an MFA in Creative Writing in 2008. Almost immediately, around the same time a classmate sold this photo of him apparently napping in a lecture to the press, he
sold a collection of short stories to a major publishing house.
Nan Graham, editor-in-chief of Scribner, calls his style "claustrophobic and ominous ... He is a surprising and powerful new literary voice".
Peek in on one of his creative writing classes
here! Or, watch the commencement speech he was supposed to make to graduating UCLA students last year, below.
And on that note, I'd like to wish you all a satisfying and prosperous academic year.