Susan Hockfield Interview (page: 2 / 8) President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Print Interview

We'd like to hear about how you first became involved in neuroscience and brain research, but first, let's go back to the beginning: your childhood and where you were born.

Susan Hockfield: I was born in Chicago, Illinois. Both my parents were from Chicago, but we moved when I was three months old. I have three sisters -- I'm the second among four girls, all within six years.

How long did you stay in Chicago?

Susan Hockfield: My father was an electrical engineer before World War II -- the son of immigrants -- and when he returned from the war, he went to law school. We moved from Chicago when he became a patent attorney for General Electric. So we moved from Chicago to Schenectady, New York when I was about three months old. His career then took him into corporate law, so he was a patent attorney for a number of years and then moved up the ranks in the American corporation of the 1950s and '60s. At the time, corporations moved people around, so we moved about every three years -- two or three years -- until I was in junior high school. So we lived in Schenectady; and then Danbury, Connecticut; Houston, Texas and then back in Danbury. We moved to Chappaqua, New York when I was in fifth grade -- about a third of the way through fifth grade -- and I went to junior high school and high school in Chappaqua.

Was that challenging for you as a student?

Susan Hockfield: You know, it seemed to me that this was just the way life was.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I remember how startled I was when I met people who had lived in a single town all their lives. I thought everyone moved around. And I can't say it bothered me at all. I actually think it was very important to move to different places and develop new friends. I personally cannot imagine how my parents moved a family of six -- little kids -- from one town to another; so they seem like kind of superheroes to me. That they could do it without seeming at all flummoxed or bothered by it. We would just pick up and move to another town. And it was, I think, actually an important part of my having a fair amount of patience with people who are different from me -- a fair amount of appreciation, I would say, for things changing. Things change. Things in my life changed all the time, and I think that's important in leadership. I think it's important. The world is changing very fast. And from what I see the people who can adapt to change the fastest are among the most successful.

How did you do academically? It sounds like these moves didn't impact your life that much.

Susan Hockfield: Well, I can say I wasn't an astonishing student until I got to graduate school, and I should say, with as much modesty as I can muster, I was an astonishing student in graduate school, but I was loving it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It wasn't until graduate school that I just fell in love with learning. Just fell in love with learning, and I could study for hours and days and it was a glorious feeling, and -- could've, would've, should've. You know, you think about what you could've done, what you might've done. I only wish I had discovered that kind of joy in learning earlier, because there are many things that I wish I knew now that I could've learned if I had been paying a little bit more attention to my studies. I have an older sister who was an astonishing student from the very beginning, and her interests and expertise lay more in the linguistic arts. She was a terrific language student, a very great reader. I mean, she was always reading. She liked history a lot. And in contrast, my intrinsic abilities took me more toward math and science, so it was a good contrast from having a sister who was about a year-and-a-half older than I was, going through school ahead of me doing astonishingly well. So you know, I got cut a little slack because my strengths were in math and science in contrast to hers. And because of that interest, it was imagined by my parents and myself that I would go to medical school -- kind of a standard thing. And while I had a deep interest, deep curiosity about how living things work -- or frankly, how all things work; I was forever taking things apart to figure out how they work -- medicine never felt exactly right to me. And it wasn't until I was in college that one of my professors suggested a different route which led me into research, and it was really the thing I had been looking for.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

So you didn't take to reading as a child, because that was your sister's thing?

Susan Hockfield: Well, it's not that I didn't take to reading.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I struggled learning to read. When I was in first grade it did not come easily to me, and by second grade, I think, I was on the full reading wagon, but it wasn't something that I wanted to spend hours doing. I would love to spend hours taking things apart around the house, but I didn't really fall in love with books the way my older sister had. However, I remember my first big book experience was when I was in third and fourth grade -- we were in the Danbury Public Schools, Danbury, Connecticut -- and the school had a library, but it sure doesn't look like the libraries that schools have today. It was a room in the basement with no windows and a place where there were just a bunch of books on shelves. And I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shelf of books -- it was probably two or three books -- a set of books with orange covers that were biographies. They were illustrated with silhouettes. So rather than very detailed drawings, they were illustrated with silhouettes. But it was the first time I had run into biography, and I devoured that collection of biographies. You know how you have these profound memories. I still remember what the books felt like, I still remember what they smelled like, and I still remember these illustrations as silhouettes. And as I recall, I think most of the biographies I read were about Americans, but it was very powerful, very powerful. And I thought of it not as history, but really understanding people and how they came to do the things that they did. And I imagine, of course, they were written for children, so they probably talked about what these very famous people had done as children. However I haven't been able to find them again, but they were really... it was a wonderful book experience.

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