A few days before she died, Margrit Betke said of her students “you were my children.” I certainly count myself
among the people who experienced Margrit as a motherly, nurturing, loving mentor who cared deeply about her
students.
I first met Margrit as a junior at BU when she was still an assistant professor. I took a class with her, and
then some months later I found myself in her office casting about for a faculty letter of recommendation that I
needed to apply for some summer job. She said “Help desk? Would you like to do something in vision?” and with
that, she changed the trajectory of my life.
She had the perfect balance of warmth and tough love. I spent many, many hours in her office receiving critique
and doing revisions. She was exacting, but always teacherly. I learned from her the importance of being generous
-- generous with credit, generous with opportunity, generous with time, and generous with the benefit of the
doubt. She trusted her students to find their way, and she was always excited to champion whatever they found
and brought back to her, even if it wasn’t quite what she was expecting.
Towards the end of my PhD, various family members started asking me what on Earth I was going to be when I grew
up. I took a class about pedagogy and spent two semesters going to a seminar series for faculty and graduate
students about teaching practices before asking her if I could teach her computer vision class in the next
semester. She agreed on the spot. I decided I was going to entirely redo the curriculum and not use her
materials. When she found me in the lab painting styrofoam goose eggs, I explained that they were for
illustrating the relationships among surface properties, surface normals, and light vectors. She smiled, and
then she laughed, and she said that it was good I had so much energy for it. I probably had the best possible
experience for my first time teaching, but I also learned a couple things about myself. I hope she wasn't too
disappointed that I decided not to follow her into academia.
A few days before she died, I told her that she is always with me. She sits on my shoulder when I write. She
still makes me more careful about the way I put words together, and reminds me to always label my figures and
include the units in axis labels and table headers. My prose sets me apart from other engineers in a field where
a lot of people are not comfortable writing.
She held our hands and said “it was a good life.” Teaching for 25+ years, she had hundreds of mentees and
students. So many people loved her. Some people who couldn’t visit her at the end asked me to take some messages
to her; there were about a dozen. Carrying those to her, I found out that, like me, there are many people that
are where they are, or who they are, today because of the way she touched their lives and set them on the path
that they ended up walking.