Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

Congratulations, Margo!

It's outside my typical poetic gamut, but as tradition dictates, and with apologies to Dr. Seuss...


She's got courage and brains
and a heart of great size,
and she's witty and clever
and patient and wise.
No fictional hero (though no challenge melts her),
she's our one and only Margo Ilene Seltzer!

She's taught 61, 161, and its 2---
she's taught so many courses, and flipped quite a few, too!
She's taught 50 and 51 -- really, it's true!
But really the one thing that matters a lot
is the incredible love for students she's got,
for it's no good at all to take a genius rare
and put them in a class for which they don't care.
But that's not our Margo!
No, our Margo gives
cooler lessons than any professor that lives.
And though it's said lecturers pump into sieves,
it's the flippers that give teaching new perspectives!

Though her thesis was on file systems to start,
she's a wizard with databases as an art:
Databases for graphs!

Or for provenance (PASS)!
To say nothing of BerkeleyDB in her past---
or of using ASC to make computers go fast!

And still that's not all; she's got a few tricks more
She's got plenty of talents and hobbies in store:
She's advisor to WiCS (and was prez' USENIX)
and her soccer team benefits from her strong kicks;
she's a masterful baker -- with no gluten at all;
she's a black belt, a poet; yes, she's got it all!

Oh Ms. Seltzer Margo!
Oh the places she'll go!
And though her Harvard colleagues may all cry "oh no",
there's a world to show
just how research is done
and how teaching and business meet under the sun.

And still, few engineers -- even good ones, I say --
could get done in a week what she does in a day,
so from Berkeley to Cambridge and now the land of "eh",
we all wish her the best, as she's up and away!