Dislocation: College, Corals, and Collaboration

by Professor Jodi Schwarz
September 3, 2025

A warm welcome to all our first-year students! It’s the beginning of your college academic journey! You’ve left home and arrived here, and have been experiencing a whirlwind week of Orientation and first classes. I suspect you are feeling excited, but also slightly disoriented.

Seniors, it is your final year at Vassar, and that must be bittersweet. As you dive into classes and activities and look forward to what this year will bring, you may also be starting to feel a measure of apprehension about what life after Vassar will look like.

And to all of us, welcome to a new academic season! The roller coaster that whizzes us through the year has arrived.

Why are we sitting here in the Chapel, at this event called Convocation?

As I see it, this is a moment for communion. Convocation gathers faculty, new and seasoned students, alums, and our extended community together, each of us bringing the glorious gift of ourselves. Bringing all of our perspectives, all our cultures, all our personalities, all our knowledge—all coming together to create a new academic community.

So, let’s do that. You just learned a bit about me from President Bradley—I’m a biology professor. I teach genetics and bioinformatics, and I study the nitty-gritty details of corals.

And if I told you the story about how I became a scientist, what would you think that story is? That I was one of those kids who loved bugs or had a genius for math? That I somehow knew where I was headed and progressed down a clear path, making rational choices along the way?

None of that describes me. Actually, I hated science in high school, probably because up to that point, my experience of learning science consisted primarily of memorizing information with little insight into why this information was important or what it revealed about the world.

So, when I went to college, it was not with a clear sense of where I was headed, except I hoped to avoid science. I had selected a college—Oberlin College in Ohio—where, much like at Vassar, students have a lot of autonomy to choose their courses, and I planned to employ that curricular feature to choose zero science classes.

Really, I was tremendously unprepared for college on many levels. Being from the Arizona desert, I had no concept of winter clothing. My first winter was brutal, with endless snow and wind blowing in from Lake Erie, and me without a winter coat.

And while I loved Oberlin, after two years, I needed a break from the winters. My friends were discussing something called “study abroad,” which I had never heard of, so I joined one of them in visiting the Study Abroad Office. I perused the materials, imagining myself studying abroad and not having the faintest sense of what that actually meant.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a brochure with a sailboat and was drawn to pick it up. It was from a program called SEA Semester, which appeared to take place aboard a giant sailboat. Well, that seemed romantic. It seemed exciting. It definitely seemed different. And if I was going to try something different, maybe this was it?

Turns out, SEA Semester was much more than a romantic journey on the high seas. It was an oceanographic research program doing hardcore ocean science. We spent six weeks at sea. We worked in teams, day and night, to sail the ship, clean the ship, prepare food, and deploy scientific equipment. Among all this logistical work, we took classes on academic topics that were completely foreign to me, such as chemical oceanography and maritime studies.

I was seasick. I lived and slept cheek by jowl in tight quarters with 35 shipmates who, like me, hadn’t showered for days. And my utter lack of scientific background made me feel I was impostering my way through it all. I felt dislocated, separated from everything that felt normal. My entire sense of equilibrium was disrupted. I felt I was existing in a weird space where I was me but also not me.

In spite of my turmoil, I found I was curious about the academic topics. Learning that most of the oxygen we breathe is created by microscopic algae blew my mind. These algae also produce a chemical called DMS that diffuses into the atmosphere and helps clouds form. You mean algae help regulate the climate? That opened the horizons of my mind, and it felt poetic.

I was having a realization—that something about myself was coming to life for the first time. That I was being connected to entirely new things that I loved, like the fact that science was a creative, and even poetic, endeavor. Like the fact that I could be living and working with people who knew things I never imagined, who did things in ways that were utterly unfamiliar, and who used language of science and sailing that I didn’t understand, but that I could depend on them—my shipmates, and they on me—to carry us through.

My shipmates and I were not just coexisting in this experience; we were co-creating it—co-creating our survival, co-creating our science, and co-creating a community.

That study abroad program was the first time I had chosen to dislocate myself into a new realm of existence, and it happened as a random outcome of seeing a photo of a sailboat. But, as a result, I discovered a love of science and experienced a fundamental truth about facing challenges: that ways forward emerged not only from my own work as an individual, but from the collaborative integration of diverse strengths.

Let’s now talk about another dislocation that prompted the emergence of something new. It is time for a biology lesson, maybe the first of your college career!

It is about corals and coral reefs.

We have all seen photos or films that feature coral reefs, like Finding Nemo. If you look at the photo on the far left of the handout, you will see how colorful a coral reef is, filled with an abundance of beautiful critters with fun names—parrot fish, spider crabs, crown of thorn sea stars, feather duster worms.

And those things in the photo that look like golden brown rocks or strange branched trees? Those are the corals of the coral reef. Believe it or not, corals are animals, which is kind of hard to wrap your mind around because they’re stationary, they have no brain, and they certainly don’t behave like the animals we see in our everyday lives.

Yet they are animals—and they are animals that create the rock. See that photo of the white skeleton? That is coral skeleton, which breaks down and compacts and becomes the rock and sand of the reef.

And that photo below it, showing a golden-brown layer on top of the skeleton? That brown layer is living coral tissue, made up of thousands of individual coral polyps, each polyp sitting in a little divot and pumping out skeleton material. And on the right side of the handout, you can see what a single coral polyp looks like, with the ring of tentacles around its body.

Corals live in the tropical oceans, which are essentially food deserts. There are not enough basic nutrients in tropical waters for algae, the plants of the sea, to grow. And without abundant algae to create the base of a food web, there is no food for corals or other animals to eat, and therefore no possibility for a coral reef ecosystem to form.

So why do we see vibrant and biodiverse coral reefs in the tropics today?

Well, improbably, at some point in the evolutionary past, some algae that needed nutrients and coral that needed food must have made contact. And realized in a biological sense that what one needed, the other could provide, and that if they integrated their different ways of being into a new, symbiotic relationship, they could turn this food desert into habitable space.

The tiny algae, shown in the upper right of the handout, make their way inside the cells of the coral polyp and live there, immersed in the coral’s nutrient waste. Each generation, the microscopic algae harvest these nutrients to grow and, through photosynthesis, make sugar and transfer that sugar to the coral as food.

By recycling resources like this, corals can grow faster, build lots more skeleton, and form the rock and the branches and crevices that other species live in. A coral reef emerges, thanks to a habitat created by a partnership of two—a plant and an animal living as one.

Dislocation, communication, integration, and a new equilibrium form. There is a human lesson in all of this: Be a coral!

If there is anything we know about a liberal arts education, it’s that it pushes us to be collaborative, to pull our perspectives and skills together to tackle challenges. Bring your “individualness” to the thorny problems we face, and at the same time look to join unfamiliar others in facing them. The most profound moments of our lives can happen when we place ourselves into a state of dislocation and see things in new ways, learning to recognize what others have to offer and discovering new parts of ourselves.

After all, the coral and the algae are from different biological universes. The language that one speaks is unintelligible to the other. Their symbiosis happened only because they figured out a way to communicate across this vast difference, discovered that they could each provide a part of the solution, and then integrated themselves together into a collaborative entity.

What will that look like for you? Dislocation is already here. What random occurrences will fall across your path? Will you have your eyes open to consider the vastly unfamiliar? Who and what will you encounter to help you face challenges and collaborate and establish equilibrium in ways you have not imagined? What will your “coral community” look like?

I have been away from Vassar this past year, again in a state of dislocation, working at the DIS Study Abroad program in Denmark and Greenland, helping to develop a program about the complex issues of the Arctic. [It was] a year of navigating multiple cultures and languages and working alongside people with entirely different worldviews, who bring so much to the table that I can’t provide myself. This pattern of dislocation and reintegration seems to be a theme in my life.

But my journey has not been a linear one. Your journey will not be linear, either. Look for chance, be curious, allow yourself to follow a few paths for which you have no idea the outcome. Seek people who speak another language and operate in a universe you don’t understand. Expect this to be uncomfortable, but also expect equilibrium to re-emerge.

And now here we are together, at the beginning of discovering all the potential ways we might engage and form community. Looking around, I see people I can’t wait to catch up with, and also people I’ve yet to meet. What glorious things will I learn? How will I be changed by what you offer? And how might I bring something new to you? What might we do together?

As we leave the Chapel today and move on to the logistics of college life, consider [that] we are all in communion in this—in these spaces of learning, in these spaces of discomfort, and in our deliberate acts of dislocation.

Thank you, and have a wonderful and symbiotic year!