Finding Inspiration by Turning Points

GATEWAY STUDY OF

LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

SCHOOL OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Finding Inspiration

Turning Points Series Discover nuggets of unconventional wisdom through the excerpts of student interviews with Rice University faculty. Copyright 2012 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.

Other books in the 2011-2012 series: Choosing Academia Fostering Curiosity Sparking Enthusiasm Overcoming Obstacles

Rice University School of Social Sciences

Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS

{series II | 2011 - 2012}

Finding Inspiration

Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.

Turning Points Series PRODUCTION TEAM

Ipek Martinez, Director of Gateway and Turning Points Mark Seraydarian, Gateway Post Baccalaureate Fellow Kaitlin Barnes, Daniel Cohen, Neeraj Salhotra, Amol Utrankar, and Catherine Yuh, Gateway Study of Leadership Fellows Brittany Fox, Editor Vinita Israni, Graphic Designer The 2011-2012 Turning Points series is made possible from excerpts of faculty interviews conducted by the following Gateway students: GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP LEADERS & FELLOWS:

Nadia Khalid, Joe Pullano, Mark Seraydarian. Kaitlin Barnes, Nivriti Chowdhry, Daniel Cohen, Navtej Dhaliwal, Chris Keller, Sherry Lin, David Liou, Abby Marcus, Zachary Marx-Kuo, Asia McCleary-Gaddy, Marc Sabbagh, Neeraj Salhotra, Rohini Rao Sigireddi, Amol Utrankar, Pin-Fang Wang, Catherine Yuh. GATEWAY INTERNATIONAL AMBASSADORS & SUMMER FELLOWS:

Kelsey Lau, Dylan McNally, Kelly Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor, Christine Pao, Emma Stockdale

A NOTE FROM THE GATEWAY DIRECTOR

The 2011-2012 Turning Points series shares excerpts from student interviews with the School of Social Sciences faculty to bring a slice of life experiences to view for the Rice University community and beyond. In the fall of 2011, the School of Social Sciences Gateway program initiated Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL), which brought three undergraduates together to organize and lead a group of sixteen student fellows in interviewing social sciences faculty and hosting distinguished guests to discover career journeys and inspiration behind research endeavors. The GSL team hosted twelve guest speakers and conducted and transcribed thirty-seven faculty interviews. They found many thought provoking life experiences and interesting stories during their candid conversations. Most interviews had an essence of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;turning pointâ&#x20AC;? regarding the decisions involved in attending college, selecting majors, pursuing advanced

degrees, encountering mentors, finding inspiration for research topics, and developing a refreshing new approach to handle criticism in order to build knowledge and propel ahead. The faculty shared tangible advice for current and prospective students, sparking their enthusiasm and fostering their curiosities. We gathered few excerpts from these conversations to share as the GSL Turning Points series, in five booklets titled: Choosing Academia, Finding Inspiration, Overcoming Obstacles, Fostering Curiosity, and Sparking Enthusiasm. Ipek Martinez

CONTENTS

Anton Villado, Ph.D. Doing Research That Results

2. Ashley Leeds, Ph.D. 3 Getting at the Answers 3.

Cliff Morgan, Ph.D. See Yourself as and Apprentice

Cymene Howe, Ph.D. Compendium of Experiences

Dagobert Brito, Ph.D. Taking a Big Risk

Dominic Boyer, Ph.D. Be Your Own Entrepeneur

Fred Oswald, Ph.D. Engineering to Psychology

Jeffrey Fleisher, Ph.D. Exactly What I Wanted

9. 10.

Jessica Logan, Ph.D. Failure as New Knowledge

John Ambler, Ph.D. Directly Relevant to Our Experiences

11.

Justin Denney, Ph.D. Finding My True Passion

12. Malcolm Gillis, Ph.D. 33 Keeping Your Word 13.

Margaret Beier, Ph.D. Broadly Conceived Intelligence

14.

Mikki Hebl, Ph.D. “Go into Teaching”

15.

Peter Hartley, Ph.D. Full Time to Energy

16.

Phillip Kortum, Ph.D. A Light Bulb Went Off

17.

Richard Stoll, Ph.D. Taking That Required Course

18.

Ruth Lopez Turley, Ph.D. You Can Do This

About the Contributors 55 Acknowledgements 63

TURNING POINTS ONE

Doing Research That Results Anton Villado, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Psychology, Rice University

My research primarily deals with training and training of complex skills. Not necessarily training or understanding how people learn simple things, like grocery lists, or names at a party. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m more interested in learning that takes hundreds of hours, like how to drive a car, perform a surgical procedure, or fly an airplane. My research is of particular interest to the military because they spend a lot of money training people to do complex tasks. My educational career took a very meandering path. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have an expectation of education because I was the first one in our family to enter higher education. A lot of the learning I did on my own, even things like when you register for college. When I think back upon it, one of my first classes that I ever 1

registered for was psychology, intro to psychology. The social psychology aspect really fascinated me, like it does many students. I immediately took a research methods class, with the same professor, because I enjoyed her so much. It was really my first semester that I found that I had a passion for research; I had no idea what I was going to do with it, with research, but I would say that it probably occurred in my first semester. My graduate advisor had a lot to do with what interested me. As an industrial organization psychologist, somebody who studies work, I found a passion for doing basic research that had a practical application. I had an interest in doing work that had practical applications, something where I could see it affecting the lives of others and industrial organizational psychology allows that, so thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s probably where most of my inspiration came from, being able to do research that results.

TURNING POINTS TWO

Getting at the Answers Ashley Leeds, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Political Science, Rice University

I think most people who start off in a career in something like political science do so because they want to make the world a better place at some level, and certainly for me that was the idea. I wanted to figure out what policies were going to result in what I considered to be normatively desirable outcomes. And I became interested in how people can work together. Essentially, how they can cooperate effectively. The reason I got really interested in institutional design and agreement design is because I feel that there’s some efficacy in studying this because it’s something that’s under the control of politicians. So if you think about when we talk about what causes war, we all want to stop war, right? The things we know cause war are being close to other countries, power relations, things like that. What are 3

you going to tell someone? Don’t be next to someone and you won’t have wars? I mean, that’s crazy. But if I tell them, “Here are the kinds of agreements you can design that are going to make you settle your disputes peacefully and make it less likely you end up in war,” there’s some real efficacy in that. I know I’m not doing this where I’m talking to people in Washington every day, but the idea is from a basic science perspective. If we have knowledge about what things are related to peace, then that’s a good outcome, right? So I was motivated in part in the subject matter by things I cared about in the world and wanted to be different. From there it’s also about thinking about how we know the answers to things. I was interested in agreements overall, but I felt like I needed a sample of agreements that were a hard case for international cooperation, that could help me study the effectiveness of international cooperation and the design of agreements. And alliances ended up being a good area in which to study that, so it was a combination of a general interest and a general perspective with something that I thought was practically effective for getting at the answers to these questions, if that makes sense. 4

Actually, the core idea for my dissertation, which wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t about alliances but about bilateral agreements and cooperation, came from reading a book by Oliver Williamson, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics. One of my pieces of advice for pushing disciplines forward is to read outside the discipline, to read things about what people are doing in other fields and to think, how does this connect to what we know and what can we draw from this?

TURNING POINTS THREE

See Yourself as an Apprentice Cliff Morgan, Ph.D. Professor, Political Science, Rice University

I don’t think anyone knows what they’re getting into when they go to graduate school. Undergraduate is mainly you go to the classes most of the time, sometimes not. If you go to class and do the homework and keep up with the readings, undergraduate is really easy. It’s really easy to make very good grades and think you’re doing fantastic. You get to graduate school and it’s not about the classes nearly as much as it is about sort of seeing yourself as an apprentice to the profession. It’s about getting involved in the research. It’s about finding out that what you have to do in class is only the tip of the iceberg of what you need to know. It’s being interested enough and willing enough to read a whole lot more of what’s going on than what they assign. But if you love it, if you love what 7

you’re studying, it’s not work. You know, you’re just having a good time, and you’re learning things, and that is sufficient reward. Being in graduate school is not just more of being an undergraduate. It’s a completely different thing, and I liked graduate school a lot better. I realized I would go into academia about midway through graduate school. I think when I started I wasn’t sure, and I really didn’t have a clue as to what the job involved or as to what went on. I think, like most people, I thought that as an undergraduate, most of the job was teaching. I sort of figured out that most of the job could be the research. Not that I don’t like the teaching; the teaching’s fun, and I think it and the research fit together really nicely and help one another. But you know, I kind of decided I never wanted to grow up and leave college, so this was a good way to do it. I like the interaction in the classroom. I think that a lot of times you guys will come up with things that cause me to look at things slightly differently. And part of it I think is just fun—that learning 8

things should be fun, just because you’re learning. Most of the time, not all students, but most of the time you have most of your students that really are interested in what you’re doing and think that learning’s fun, and they’re sort of engaged in that. So, I like watching that and being a part of that. I don’t think I’m so interesting that I think my lectures are fascinating, but I like seminars a lot better. You’re able to interact and see how other people are thinking about things. And arguing—sort of fighting with them about it.

TURNING POINTS FOUR

Compendium of Experiences Cymene Howe, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Rice University

It is difficult to know exactly what forces shape a person throughout childhood because it’s a very long origin story. But, of course, all of us look back on history with 20/20 vision. So I too look back and I say, “Aha, well this is the reason why I went into this field of research, and this is the reason why I became an anthropologist.” But was it really causal? Maybe. As I look back, I can see that traveling to the developing world at a fairly young age, in my early teens is maybe a little unusual for a North American. I spent time in Mexico and other places. I didn’t have what I would call the advantage of growing up in a family that was very multinational, that was moving from place to place, or being the child of a diplomat, or a service person. But I did start to become acquainted with other cultures and populations fairly 11

early in life. I also grew up in a part of the country that is considered to be very progressive and has a strong background in feminist organizing, gay and lesbian rights, and issues around sexual politics and gender politics. Those politics and attitudes were part of my cultural ecology growing up. I grew up with my mother, primarily, because my dad and mom were divorced. I also had some people in my family who had alternative sexualities who perhaps didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t identify as lesbians, per se, but it was pretty clear that they werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stereotypically heterosexual and that they had relationships that appeared to be same-sex relationships. I think that, in part, sparked my interest in non-normative sexuality because it was somewhat present in my own family, and I was curious about it growing up in the political context of Santa Cruz, California. Then when I was an undergraduate, I went to Berkeley at a time when queer theory was beginning to unfold as a major intellectual moment in gender and sexuality studies. Judith Butler, who is a kind of 12

goddess in the world of queer theory, was teaching there at the time. So I was reading this material as it was happening and was very new and very fresh. I think that too was part of my intellectual direction, stimulating me to do work on gender and sexuality, specifically in Latin America, because of the places where I had traveled when I was younger. So as I look back on that compendium of experiences, I guess you can add those all together and say, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ah, well of course she would become an anthropologist studying gender and sexuality in Central America.â&#x20AC;?

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Taking a Big Risk Dagobert Brito, Ph.D. Professor, Economics, Rice University

When I was a young assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1971, I became interested in formal models of arms races. This was a subject of interest in political science, but there were very few people in economics working of this problem. One of the senior members of the economics department took me aside and told me, “You know, you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not good for your career. Why don’t you work on labor issues instead?” He meant well, and it might have been good advice. I am sure he was trying to give me good career advice. He did not believe I was working on an interesting problem and I should be doing something else. So I accepted a job offer at Ohio State as an associate professor and was promoted to professor after three years. I worked on arms races and related problems until the end of the Cold War. 15

The criticism was not hostile. I am sure the senior faculty member who advised me really had my best interests at heart. There are cultures such as economics and there are things expected to do in culture. If you do not conform, you take a big risk. It either pays off big or it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t.

TURNING POINTS SIX

Be Your Own Entrepreneur Dominic Boyer, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Anthropology, Rice University

Coming from an academic family, it was very easy to imagine oneself in that way and difficult to imagine oneself as something else. I think people’s horizons, as much as we may not like to admit it, are very deeply shaped in our families, in our immediate life experiences when we are children, and I grew up basically in the environment in the University of Chicago where my father is faculty, and their slogan is “Life of the Mind,” and it very much was sort of the flavor in the air so to speak. I do think the most natural pathway to me did seem to be academic life, and, although I thought about some others along the way, it was both in this case sort of being sociologically pointed in that direction and then also actually enjoying it. And so those two things together made it all too easy to travel that path.

I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say my father was so much of a mentor, I mean definitely an influence, but not a mentor. I had a good relationship with my doctoral advisor, Marshall Sahlins, who knew nothing about Germany and wanted to know nothing about Germany, but we certainly had a fairly warm relationship and talked about a lot of other things, and he certainly had a large intellectual influence on me at that time and took the time actually to talk, although sometimes we would talk about college football or basketball, which was what he actually liked to talk about, more than about academic matters per se. Still, I would say there was definitely an encouraging relationship there; there was support without a doubt. Although in general, I think the graduate experience that I had and that I think many of my colleagues had, peers had, was one that you were expected to sort of be your own entrepreneur, to sort of do it yourself, and so that we relied a lot on our peer networks for support because the faculty were very busy, and very much involved in their own activities, and there were a lot of us so they couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give us all the time we wanted, sort of like being in a very large family in a way. So there was support, and 18

even some mentorship I would say; it was a positive experience.

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

Engineering to Psychology Fred Oswald, Ph.D. Professor, Psychology, Rice University

When I first entered college, I was an engineering major and didn’t know anything about IO psychology and really not much about psychology as a whole. Any attraction I had to psychology was through counseling psychology, because my roommate’s mom was a counselor, and that led me to thinking about exploring psychology courses in college. That, in turn, is what exposed me to individual differences psychology, the area of psychology that deals with how you define and measure people’s motivation, intelligence, or their interest in things. That course was taught by a professor who was an IO psychologist. That course in individual differences was probably one of the more challenging courses I ever had—even as challenging as engineering, physics, or anything else I took in the hard sciences. And so when he offered 21

a course subsequently in industrial/organizational psychology, you know, he was so good in this one course I just wanted to take another course, almost independent of the subject material. But the material itself was terrific. I thought it was really great that industrial psychology was this combination quantitative methodsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which was what I was interested in anyway when I was into engineering and so onâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but also how you investigate a human or psychological problem in the workplace in a systematic way by gathering and analyzing data. So that really is what led me to decide on my specialty when it came to applying for grad schools. And then a decade plus has passed, and here I sit.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

Exactly What I Wanted Jeffrey Fleisher, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Rice University

Was an interest in archaeology rooted in my childhood, or was it something I became interested in later on in life? Well, the short answer is I never even thought about being an archaeologist, and I just wasn’t even that kind of kid. I didn’t even like to get dirty. I went to college…sometimes I talk about this in my intro class, but I went to college as a Business major, and I chose my university because they had a good undergraduate Commerce program; it was the University of Virginia. It’s incredible. For three semesters I took classes like Accounting and Intro to Economics, and I was doing very well, and I took an Intro to Anthropology class to fulfill an area requirement, and I was just kind of floored by the class. I was kind of mystified by it because it was something so different from what I had studied, and I decided I wanted to take more of those classes so 23

I stayed on the Business track for another semester and started to take other Anthropology classes and decided that this is it, this is what is challenging for me and then in the course of taking—I was going to be a cultural anthropologist—and in the course of doing that, I had an opportunity to do an archaeological dig one summer, and I thought, “Oh, I will get some credits,” and then I realized that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

TURNING POINTS NINE

Failure as New Knowledge Jessica Logan, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Psychology, Rice University

When I first came in as a first-year graduate student, I was young and full of hope, and I thought, “This is fantastic. I get to study exactly what I love.” Sometimes PhD programs say they’re four-year programs. They’re not. In psychology, they’re five or six. About halfway through, after I got my master’s, I thought, “Yay, I have my Master’s, but I’m only halfway through, and I’ve got three or four more years of this”. One of the problems of academia is that it can really be about criticism, if you let it be. Science is the idea that you’re trying to create new knowledge. As humans, we’re not actually that good at predicting things. A lot of times, we fail. We have this idea, it seems really well thought out, we do it, and it doesn’t work. It took me a long time in graduate school to accept failure as new knowledge. Not as, “You stink at this,” but as, “Now you know 25

something, so let’s move on.” During the time period before you learn that, you submit a paper, get reviews back, and people are saying, “This isn’t very good, what are you thinking here?” You’re thinking, “Oh gosh, I’m just not any good at this.” I definitely thought at some point that this wasn’t for me. I couldn’t do this for a living, and I wouldn’t be any good at it. I remember talking to my advisor about that. He basically said, “You need to get a publication so that you feel good about it. You need to take some time off and do a bunch of reading. Just read a bunch of articles that you’re interested in. As you read one article, they’ll cite someone else, and you’ll go read that paper. Just take that time off, and by the time you’re done with that, you’ll have immersed yourself in this world and know where your interest is.” I did that, and he was absolutely right. At the end of it, I had all these ideas, and tied all these different things together. He said, “That’s how you’ll know that you can do this. To you, it’s not about the job, it’s about the pursuit of knowledge.” That was a really good point for me. But even once you become a professor, 26

your challenges are not over. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re never done. There are always ways to improve, and you tend to have doubts, but I think what keeps me going is that I still find this stuff really interesting.

TURNING POINTS TEN

Directly Relevant to Our Experience John Ambler, Ph.D. Professor, Political Science, Rice University

I had a French teacher as an undergraduate who was absolutely wonderful, spoke beautiful French, and was low-key and very inspiring. I was planning to teach high school and needed two teaching subjects, so one of them was going to be history and the other was French as a result of her inspiration. I ended up going to France, spending the year at the University of Bordeaux. That was a turning point, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why most of my career Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve spent working on France, on various series of topics that involve oftentimes comparative research, so I could stay in France. When I went to Bordeaux as a historian, my advisor said he had a couple of subjects on the 18th century that he would suggest I could work on, and I said, 29

“Well, I’m really more interested in the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.” And he said, “You mean political science. History ends with the French Revolution here.” That’s not altogether true, but I went on to become a political science student. That’s one of the major reasons why I got very much interested in political science, through my work in France, and stayed with it thinking it was a little more contemporary, a little more directly relevant to our experience today than some kinds of history are. And when I went to graduate school, it was just a natural. I knew I was interested in comparative politics, and France became a logical kind of choice for research.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

Finding My True Passion Justin Denney, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Sociology, Rice University

I was interested in sociology, I wasn’t sure what to do with it, and so that’s sort of my story in a nutshell—following my interests to today. But I knew that I was interested enough to pursue sociology beyond the undergraduate degree and so I decided to go to graduate school and, like a lot of sociology undergraduate majors, I was intrigued by the discipline because of issues that would fall more closely to criminology. It hooks in a lot of students. Crime is sort of a sexy topic. Why does it occur, why does it continue to occur, there’s a number of things you can talk about and think about in terms of criminology, so I think that’s what originally hooked in a lot of my interests, but in graduate school I found my true passion within sociology, and that is the study of social determinants of health and mortality. So once I had that moment where I 31

thought, this is not only something that fascinates me now and has likely fascinated me my entire life—how these things we have been talking about influence health and mortality—but it’s something I would like to make a career out of studying, teaching, and talking about. So I had that realization very early on in graduate school and I think that probably was the moment that I realized that it was something that I could do that I was extremely interested in and wanted to talk more about and wanted to be that skeptic and talk to people about and do research that revealed sort of these underlying causes of our health and mortality, that we often speak of health and mortality as a very individualistic thing. The biomedical model is to treat the disease and treat the condition, and that’s extremely relevant to how well and to how long we live, but the work that I do tries to uncover those social elements that come before those physiological and biological processes that actually cause us to be in ill health and to die. It turns out that these social conditions precede all of that and that’s something that I’m extremely passionate about, and it addresses my interests in inequality, and it addresses my interests in these general sociological phenomenon. 32

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

Keeping Your Word Malcolm Gillis, Ph.D. Professor, Economics, Rice University

I helped found a private university in Germany modeled after Rice. This is a really interesting story that made my Chilean friends cry last week. They said, “How did you get involved in Germany?” While I was at Duke and I was Dean of the Faculty, I was encouraged by the former provost, a wonderful man named Taylor Cole, who said, “Malcolm, you’ve got to see about getting more collaboration between Duke and German universities. Some of them are very interesting, and, actually, they need help.” He was in the predecessor agency to the CIA during the Second World War. He was dropped behind German lines, but then he helped found the Free University of Berlin. So he said, “Malcolm, you’ve got to go the Free University of Berlin. You’ve got to go to Heidelberg, to Cologne, and get us going with collaboration.” At Duke, the deans got to do 33

whatever we pleased. We raised our own money. I was just getting ready to get Duke in Berlin. I was going to get some property at an old US army base right outside of Berlin. The buildings there were really nice. I was just getting ready to cut a deal, and they decided to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin. That meant no more space. There that went. So I came back and then the people at Rice came to interview me and I came to Rice, so I had to drop all that. The thing, though, that caused me to have continuing interest was that just before I left Duke, Taylor Cole, who was a Texan, had a heart attack here in Texas, and he got on a plane and took himself back to North Carolina and checked himself into the Duke hospital. So I got a call that said, “Come see me.” So I came to see him. He was all hooked up and all. He said, “Come here.” I came over and he said, “Give me your hand.” He grabbed it and said, “Swear, swear that for the rest of your life you’ll promote collaboration between German and American universities. Swear.” Well, I said, “I swear.” And then he died. 34

So when I came to Rice in 1993, I had a group come from Heidelberg wanting to establish a branch campus there. I said no to that. I had a group come from Cologne that wanted to establish a branch campus. No, we don’t do that. I had a group from Bremen, and they said, “We want to talk about a new kind of university but we don’t know what to do.” And I said, “Let me tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to send my provost and three deans over there to check out the landscape and see if we can help.” It turned out we could. It turned out they were just right for a private, English-speaking, German university modeled after Rice, including the residence halls. We got the city-state to give us $250 million unconditionally. We bought the property—an old tank base north of Bremen, which I thought was worth $400 million but we got it for $37 million. We renovated the campus and opened in 2002. It’s been very successful. The point is—and this is what made my Chilean friends cry—when I came back and told my wife that I was sending the provost and the deans over, she said, “Paying back your promise to Taylor Cole?” And so they [the Chileans] said, “We’re going to get you to swear 35

about Chile.” But I take this thing very seriously because when you promise something, you’ve got to do it. My granddaughter, when she was eight years old, said she wanted to go to Graceland. And I said, “When you’re twelve.” When she was twelve, she said, “Four years ago, you promised to take me to Graceland.” I said, “I sure did,” so I took her and her sister.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

Broadly Conceived Intelligence Margaret Beier, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Psychology, Rice University

Let me tell you a little about why I am interested in what I am interested in. I went back to graduate school as a non-traditional student, and I was always very interested in this idea that younger people are more intelligent than older people, which is kind of a prevalent belief in cognitive psychology. The idea is after your mid-twenties or early thirties, you lose your working memory capacity. Those are the cognitive abilities we focus on most in psychology. But I had been in the working world for a number of years and what I noticed was something opposite. The people who were older were more relied on, more intelligent, had the experience. When you factor in experience as a cognitive ability, intelligence is more broadly conceived. Many professors who are most knowledgeable are older because they have the experience. 37

I was so intrigued by this notion that is pushing cognitive psychology that we lose ability with age, and I wanted to focus more on what we gain with age. I was over 30 when I started taking some of these classes. When they would draw these trajectories of this downhill slope I was just thinking, “It can’t be right.” So that really led me to my research on aging and how age affects performance at work. We know, for example, that cognitive ability is the best predictor of job performance that we have, and we also know it declines with age as measured. But we don’t see a negative correlation between age and job performance because in many jobs, we rely on different types of abilities that we learn through knowledge and experience. One of my main areas of research right now is on training an aging population. The idea is we do a lot of research on how best to train college undergraduates and elementary students. We really don’t know how people best learn, so a lot of my 38

work is focused on thatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;how to best train and retrain older workers. The idea is around discovery learning. Lower structuring learning may not work as well with older people who have less working memory capacity, but if you can provide some structure for them, they can actually do quite well and learn just as much as the others.

TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN

“Go into Teaching” Mikki Hebl, Ph.D. Professor, Psychology, Rice University

I remember when I was in college, I had this crisis as lots of students do about, “Oh crap, now I’m not going to go pre-med. What am I going to do with my life?” I remember there was this president of Smith. Her name was Mary Maples Dunn, and she gave this talk to all the students at one of her addresses, and it basically—this was like 1990—went like this. “If you all want to do something great with your life, go into teaching, especially college level teaching. There are so many jobs in academia that are opening up because people are retiring and it’s just a great field. There’s a lot of need.” And I thought, “Wow, what would it be like to be a college professor?” If you had asked me before I got to Smith College what I wanted to do, I would’ve said, “I kind of want to do something like teach and coach a sport in some private school, like a high school.” I 41

like adolescents a lot and, in fact, sometimes, I feel like our college students are just big adolescents with post-adolescent identity crisis. That is, instead of the adolescent “Who am I?” it’s “What am I going to be? Where do I belong?” it’s more like “Oh my God, everybody else is on a path, where’s my path?” I get that, and I remember the stress. I get the whole trying to figure yourself out and trying to figure out where you belong. So that appealed to me, and then I like sports so I thought I could coach a sport too. I had a very close experience at private school where a lot of teachers were very young and became very close friends. In some ways, I felt a lot closer to my teachers than I felt to the boarding students, and they really reached out to help. It was very collaborative and there wasn’t a lot of distance between the teachers and the students. The teachers lived on campus with the students, and they served as role models for how much teachers can affect students.

TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN

Full Time to Energy Peter Hartley, Ph.D. Professor, Economics, Rice University

I got scholarships to a number of places to do graduate work. I had the best deal at Chicago, so I went there. Around meals, we were talking about all sorts of intellectual things in different fields. So, that was really a pretty exciting place. There were a number of professors on the faculty there who were just brilliant and very inspiring in terms of thinking about economics and applying economics to lots of different aspects of human behavior. Although Milton Friedman was there only for my first year, others such as Gary Becker, Bob Lucas, Arnold Harberger, George Stiegler, Jacob Frankel, and Lester Telser had a strong impact on me. A lot of professors there were really very inspiring. Gary Becker was just incredible; I took every course I could with him. Every time you would go to a lecture there would be something that was eye-opening 43

or very interesting—he had a great talent to use economics to understand human behavior and that was very inspiring. In response to a question about how he got involved in environmental and energy economics, Peter Hartley said the following: I was interested

in geography, and I grew up in Australia and spent a lot of time bird watching as a kid. My wife jokes that if you grew up where I grew up, you’d probably be a bird watcher too, since the bird life is the most interesting thing there. One reason I went into economics was that I had an interest in environmental issues especially conservation of Australian wildlife and natural environments. I was also quite interested in geology; I used to spend hours going around and poking around different quarries and rock places. If I hadn’t gotten the scholarship to go to the Australian National University, I was thinking of doing geology. I had an interest in natural environments and so on. There was no energy economics at Chicago. In fact, there wasn’t really much natural resource economics at all. When I came out Chicago to do a PhD, I 44

kept my job with the government of Australia. But when I graduated, I got offered a job at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor. So I decided that was too good an offer to turn down, and it was like continuing in graduate education. So I went to Princeton, and I was glad I did do that, and it did give me a different perspective on economics in a different place. I resigned my job with the Australian government. I had the idea I was not going to stay at Princeton in the long term, so I went down to Australia in the summers to maintain my contacts there. The very first thing they were doing was a report commissioned by the state government on energy issues in the state of Victoria. I found that incredibly interesting, given my interest in applied economics, and the idea that you could apply it to these energy and environmental issues, so I threw myself into it, even though it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really what I had done in graduate school, and it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t what I was really doing as an assistant professor, so it was kind of like what I did in Australia. I developed a model of the Victorian electricity system and did a lot of 45

research in natural gas and coal. So I had this kind of dual existence where I was doing this energyrelated work, and I got a reputation in Australia for doing energy economics—applied microeconomics, more generally. In the US, I was doing monetary economics—monetary theory. So when I got a job from Rice, I kept on going back to Australia and kept on doing energy and environment research. Eventually, how I got into energy here was when the Baker Institute started. The Baker Institute started in Texas, and they wanted to get into public policy. And they decided that, quite sensibly, given the location, that if they were going to be competitive in public policy, there were two policy areas where they could compete—well, three: health, space, and energy. So given that I’d done energy work in Australia, I guess it was natural that I had an interest in contributing to the energy research here. So I basically decided that I would transition, full time to energy.

TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN

A Light Bulb Went Off Phillip Kortum, Ph.D. Professor-in-the-Practice, Psychology, Rice University

When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor who took an interest in me. His name was Dr. Michael Riley at the University of Nebraska. It’s a great school. I love the University of Nebraska. And I didn’t realize that I wanted to study engineering psychology until I took his engineering psychology course. And the minute I took his course, it was just like a light bulb went off. I recognized that I was interested in the psychology side of it, and I knew I was interested in the engineering side of it, but I didn’t really understand that there was a discipline that combined them in a very specific way. And he was such a kind and generous man and helped me stay on track and gave me great advice about what I should do and how I should pursue that kind of work. And so he’s really the one who pushed me over 47

the edge and said if you want to go in this direction, this is what you need to do.

TURNING POINTS SEVENTEEN

Taking That Required Course Richard Stoll, Ph.D. Professor, Political Science, Rice University

When I went off to college, I had this sense that I would probably go to law school, and, like many undergraduates, I didn’t quite comprehend that law school was just a path but not a final destination. But if you’d asked me what I would do after getting a law degree, I would have said, “Well, I don’t know, maybe work for the government, something like that.” I started down the path to being a political science major. Where I was an undergraduate, there was only one specifically required course for the political science major. There were choices for everything else. This course required a research paper and generations of students at the University of Rochester would put that course off until their senior year with the idea, “Well, hopefully they’ll change the damn requirement.” But they never did.

So, at the end of my freshman year, I was talking to a couple friends of mine who lived on my hall, and all three of us were pretty convinced we would major in political science. We said, “Well, this is really silly. Let’s get this stupid course out of the way.” So, there we were in the course with about fifty other students. The University of Rochester is a bit bigger than Rice, but not double the size. There were 47 seniors and three sophomores and we started out by reading a book by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure

of Scientific Revolutions, which is a classic work of philosophy of science. It is a real slog, and we discovered our professor deliberately used that book as a way to drive students out of the course. After about two weeks of going through that, he closed the book and said, “Okay, I’ve driven out those that I can. Now we’re going to talk about how to do research.” The three of us asked him early on if we could work on a common paper. He said it was fine, and we actually did a piece on guerilla wars, which focused on conditions for both victory and for defeat. It was marginally quantitative. What I discovered in the process of doing that 50

paper was that I really enjoyed doing research. In political science, job choices are very constrained. So I decided I wanted to go to grad school and get a PhD because that was the only pathway that I could see that would allow me to do research. It turned out that the University of Rochester had an excellent political science department. I was encouraged by professors to take graduate courses in political science. I actually had four graduate courses under my belt as an undergraduate. It all started by taking that required course to get it out of the way and discovering that I enjoyed that process.

TURNING POINTS EIGHTEEN

Systematically Studying Disparities Ruth Lopez Turley, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Sociology, Rice University

When I took my first sociology course as an undergrad, it was stunning for me to see that there’s actually a systematic study of the things that I had observed during my childhood. I wouldn’t have known what to call them, I wouldn’t have known what it was. I just knew that once I got to Stanford, the way I grew up was very different from most of my classmates and very different from Palo Alto. The Bay Area, and especially in the area immediately surrounding Stanford, is very wealthy. I felt like I was quite literally in a very different world. And to then attend a sociology class where we were actually systematically studying these disparities and studying the factors that explained these systematic disparities was really stunning because it just hadn’t 53

occurred to me there was something explaining what I had seen. That it wasn’t just, “Oh, we’re all inferior.” Because I, to some extent, really believed it. That we’re all poor, and Hispanics, in particular, are all struggling with these things, and we’re just inferior. There were a handful of white students in my high school, and they were all at the top of the class. And they were all wealthier. And if that’s all you see, after a while you start to believe that they’re just smarter, they’re just better, and that’s just the way it is. But then to see—you can imagine me sitting in the sociology class and all of the structural forces coming into play at the same time. “Oh, it’s not that I’m just inferior. It’s way more complicated than that.” And it was so amazing to me to learn that—of course I was drawn to it, and I thought, “I have to study this more.” And then to get beyond the studying phase and learning about it. Now I’m at the phase where I really want to change that. I really want to do something about it, because this is crazy, that things are the way they are in 2011.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

John Ambler is a Professor of Political Science. He has published a number of books and articles on French politics in comparative perspective. His recent work has focused on comparative social and education policy in Western Europe. In both 1994 and 2002, Dr. Ambler was recognized for his outstanding teaching with the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Alumni have also chosen Dr. Ambler for the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching four times. Dr. Ambler earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Margaret Beier is an Associate Professor of Psychology. Her research interests broadly focus on adult intellectual development, working memory, domain specific knowledge, gender differences in cognition, and predicting success for adults in organizations and educational settings. Dr. Beierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work includes examining the role of cognitive ability, personality traits, and demographic factors in learning. She earned a Ph.D. in industrial/ organizational psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dominic Boyer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. His research focuses broadly on expertise, knowledge, media and journalism. He is currently working on projects investigating late socialist aesthetics of parody and modern political discourse, the politics of renewable energy development in Mexico, and transformation of news practices among German and American journalists in Europe and the United States. Dr. Boyerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s books include

Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Understanding Media: A popular philosophy (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Dr. Boyer earned a B.A. from Brown University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. Dagobert Brito is the Peterkin Professor of Political Economy. His fields of interest include economic theory and public finance. His current research encompasses optimal tax theory, economics of defense, energy economics, and law economics. His research has addressed fundamental issues involving public goods and political decisions. He has developed models involving such disparate but important issues as arms races, common property resources, vaccines, and credit cards. Dr. Brito has made important contributions to such topics as the control of macroeconomic systems, the St. Petersburg Paradox, the Nash Bargaining Problem, optimal taxation, and nuclear proliferation. He has been recognized by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy as a Baker Institute Rice Scholar. Dr. Brito earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in economics from Rice University. Justin Denney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Urban Health Program within the Kinder Institute of Urban Research. As a health researcher with sociological and demographic training, he is principally interested in identifying individual and structural conditions that jointly contribute to health and mortality inequalities. His publications have focused on both domestic and international settings and have

addressed topics such as the effects of family formations on individual suicide risks, neighborhood contributors to obesity, and the effects of nation-level social and economic development on socioeconomic gaps in unhealthy behaviors such as cigarette smoking. Dr. Denney is currently involved in multiple projects aimed broadly at clarifying the effects of context on individual health and mortality prospects and hopes his work can inform public policy and ultimately lead to healthier populations. Jeffrey Fleisher is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. His research is based on the Swahili coast in eastern Africa, where he focuses on the role of rural and nonelite populations in the political economy of complex societies and the way that people use material culture and space in the establishment and maintenance of social inequality and power. After working on Pemba Island, Zanzibar for many years, he has recently begun focusing on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara in southern Tanzania. This NSF-funded project is investigating the way â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;emptyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; spaces in an urban milieu were locations where social power could be established and maintained, as well as the way that monuments (like Swahili tombs) and the spaces that surround them may have been active sites of memory-making, a part of the strategic use of the past for the present. Dr. Fleisher earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Malcolm Gillis is a Zingler Professor of Economics and served as the sixth President of Rice University from 19932004. His research and teaching activities fall into two broad classes of national and international issues, fiscal reform and environmental policy. Dr. Gillis has authored

over ninety articles and co-authored or edited eight books including the leading textbook in its field, Economics of Development (5th edition), which is now available in five languages. He has served on many boards including the National Council for Science and the Environment, St. Lukeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Episcopal Hospital, and AECOM Technology Corporation. From 2001-2006 he was Chairman of the Board of BioHouston, Inc., a nonprofit organization whose mission is to establish the Houston region as a vigorous global competitor in life science and biotechnology commercialization. From 2008-2011, he was Vice-Chair of the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas. Peter Hartley is the George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair and a Professor of Economics. He is also a Rice Scholar of energy economics for the Baker Institute. Dr. Hartley has worked for more than 25 years on energy economics issues, focusing originally on electricity, but also including work on natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear energy, and renewable energy. He wrote on reform of the electricity supply industry in Australia throughout the 1980s and early 1990s and advised the government of Victoria when it completed the acclaimed privatization and reform of the electricity industry in that state in 1989. Apart from energy and environmental economics, Dr. Hartley has published research on theoretical and applied issues in money and banking, business cycles, and international finance. Mikki Hebl is a Professor of Psychology. She is an applied psychologist who is part of the industrial/organizational program at Rice University. Her research focuses on issues related to diversity and discrimination. She is particularly interested in examining subtle ways in which

discrimination is displayed and how such displays might be remediated by individuals and/or organizations. Research in the Hebl Lab focuses on issues related to identifying, understanding, and remediating discrimination. She blends a social, interpersonal with an organizational perspective to investigate discrimination. Dr. Hebl has earned numerous teaching awards throughout her career, including the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2003. Cymene Howe is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and core faculty member in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research broadly considers how forms of subjectivity, advocacy, and knowledge are produced and mediated within particular political contexts. In Nicaragua, she has studied how sexual rights activists have employed the concepts and practices of human rights and global lesbian and gay liberation in order to develop a very specific set of political tools to challenge heterosexism in both its legal and cultural forms. Her current research, in collaboration with Dominic Boyer, investigates the political and social dynamics surrounding sustainable energy development. Currently, she and Professor Boyer are investigating how “climatological altruism” and “energopolitics” converge in the political, economic, and social brokerage occurring in response to wind park development in Oaxaca, Mexico. Phillip Kortum is a Professor-in-the-Practice and Faculty Fellow of Psychology. His research is focused on the development of user-centric systems in both the visual (web design, equipment design, and image compression) and auditory (telephony operations and interactive voice response systems) domains. For the last twenty

years, he has studied hands-on human factors in the telecommunications and defense industry. This work was performed across a wide variety of human interfaces, from telephones and television set-top boxes to assembly aids and jigs. Dr. Kortum earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Ashley Leeds is an Associate Professor of Political Science. She specializes in the study of international relations and particularly in the design and influence of cooperative agreements and international institutions. Much of her recent research has focused on the politics of military alliances. Dr. Leedsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; recent articles have appeared in American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, Journal of Peace Research, and International Interactions. In 2008, Dr. Leeds was the recipient of the Karl Deutsch award, which is awarded annually by the International Studies Association to a scholar in IR under age 40 who is judged to have made, through a body of publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research. Jessica Logan is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research interests integrate both behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to explore episodic memory formation and retrieval in healthy younger and older adults. In manipulations of memory formation (encoding) and retrieval, she has used a variety of materials (word fragment completion, paired associates, facename pairs, and foreign language vocabulary words) to explore how basic principles of cognition can be applied to improve learning and retention in younger and older adults. Dr. Logan earned a Ph.D. in experimental

psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. Ruth Lopez Turley is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focuses on educational inequality in the U.S., with the aim of closing socioeconomic gaps in achievement and attainment. Her work includes the study of the transition from high school to college, college expectations, the Hispanic-White college application gap, college proximity, parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; contributions to college costs, living on campus during college, K-12 educational outcomes of immigrant youth, the evidence-based school interventions movement, student mobility, and relations of trust among parents and school personnel (social capital). Dr. Turley currently serves as the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium. Cliff Morgan is the Albert Thomas Professor of Political Science. He uses formal modeling techniques in his research to explain foreign policy decisions and international conflict. His current projects focus on the use and effectiveness of economic sanctions and on how leaders choose foreign policy tools to accomplish their goals. Dr. Morgan earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Fred Oswald is a Professor of Psychology. His substantive research focuses on personnel selection issues in psychology, particularly the issues of (a) understanding and predicting multiple dimensions of job performance and (b) improving the conceptualization and application of person-job fit. His work provides important contributions to personnel selection in both academic and employment settings. His most recent research contributes to understanding and predicting multiple dimensions of job

and academic performance. Another area of his research contributions is in advancing the conceptualization and application of person-job fit. Dr. Oswald earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. and Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Minnesota. Richard Stoll is the Albert Thomas Chair of Political Science and Professor of Political Science. An accomplished scholar of international conflict, he has used computer simulation techniques and statistical analysis to study topics such as arms competitions, comparative foreign policy, and political realism. Dr. Stoll recently participated in a ten university effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to collect data on militarized interstate disputes. Along with Devika Subramanian of Riceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Computer Science Department, Dr. Stoll is engaged in an effort to create events data from online news sources and to predict the outbreak of serious international conflict. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Anton Villado is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. His primary research interests involve individual and team training; the acquisition, retention, and transfer of complex skills (e.g., those used in the military and medical industry); personality; measurement of job performance; personnel selection and quantitative methods (metaanalysis and multi-level modeling). Dr. Villado earned a B.A. in psychology from California State University at San Bernardino, an M.S. in industrial/organizational psychology from California State University at San Bernardino, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Texas A&M University.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to all Rice University School of Social Sciences faculty who made this project possible by sharing their career experiences and educational life stories with the Gateway students through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to Dean Lyn Ragsdale for her continual support, counsel and encouragement. Our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and supporters of the Gateway programs for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also to the Turning Points team and Gateway Study of Leadership fellows for the tremendous amount of time and effort in bringing this series to life.