Susan Hockfield Interview (page: 3 / 8) President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Print Interview

Was there anyone in your childhood or adolescence who particularly inspired you, or someone you wanted to emulate?

Susan Hockfield: I'm often asked whether there was some individual who lit the candle. There were many people who, I would say, fanned the flames. One of the wonderful things that my parents did -- again, four girls. I don't know whether they had been hoping for a boy. Who knows? But it was just assumed that all of us could do whatever we wanted to do. There wasn't any kind of suggestion, "Oh, you can't do that because you're a girl." Although when it came to choosing musical instruments, none of us picked up the trombone. We all started on piano, and two of my sisters stayed with piano. I moved to violin. One of my sisters actually became a very fine musician on the flute. When I think about what instruments we played, clearly all options may not have been opened, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like we could do anything we wanted to. And at the time, when you're three or four years old, you don't think, "Oh, I'd like to be a biologist," because that's not part of your world view.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I think back to the things that intrigued me, when I was probably by four or five, it was biological things. And so I had this sense of enormous anticipation. My older sister, of course, got to freshman biology in high school before I did. I was so envious. Oh, I was so envious! And when I finally got to that course it was just heaven. And then I took a marvelous course my senior year. There was an advanced biology class for a small set of students who had been through the whole science sequence, and it was a wonderful, wonderful class. We worked with real animals, we did experiments with rats. It was really about mammalian physiology, and that was a terrific class. And I arranged -- I don't know where I got this idea -- but I arranged to take the AP exam in biology. The school didn't give an AP course in biology. There was AP English and AP math -- probably AP history, I don't think I took that -- but somehow I got the idea in my head that I would like to take AP biology. So I was excused from class to spend -- I don't remember how many weeks -- sitting in the library reading a college biology textbook, which was interesting but I don't describe it as a lot of fun.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

You say you turned a corner in your love of learning when you reached the graduate level. Was there a connection to your discovery of neuroscience as a field of study?

Susan Hockfield: I think so. When I was in college I was majoring in biology. I actually wondered over a couple of years whether to major in biology or English. Having confessed I wasn't a great reader, but literature has an extraordinary appeal. I studied a lot of literature and poetry when I was in college and I think at that stage of late adolescence, the lessons in life, the lessons in expression that you get from literature were quite appealing to me. In any case, I decided to major in biology, but there was still this sense of pressure and determination that I would go to medical school and I was feeling quite increasingly uncomfortable with it. I was studying biology, but most of the students in my classes were pre-med, and they were approaching the classes and the class material in a very different way from how I wanted to approach it. Then finally, in my junior year I took a course in cell biology taught by a professor named Jerome Kaye, and it was the course I had been looking for. It was wonderfully exciting. The structure of the cell and the function of the cell had just begun to be dissected at very high resolution because of new technology that had come on board within the last several years.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In class one day, Professor Kaye described a puzzle. So this is my first sense of science that was actually being made as we were learning about it. So he described this problem and it seemed to me the direction to answer that problem was very obvious. And I went to see him in office hours and I said, "Why is this a problem? Why is this a puzzle? Because you could just take this particular route." And he looked at me and he said, "Well, why don't you do that?" And it was at that moment that I first began to understand that this marvelous science -- a set of discoveries I had been reading about and enjoying -- was done by people. You know, people like me. Not some other class of people that was separate from who I might be. And so I asked him how I would do that, and he said, "Well you know, there's a medical school across the way. Just go over there, walk around and ask someone to give you a job." So being a very trusting person I walked over to the medical school and I walked around and asked if people would give me a job. Why they would hire me I cannot imagine, but I actually did find someone who hired me for a part-time job. I graduated a semester early and went to work in the lab and it was, as I described a minute ago, the thing I had been looking for. Absolutely intoxicating. It was a neurobiology lab. I did not go looking for a neurobiology lab, but stumbled into a neurobiology lab, and everything about it I just loved. I loved the science, I loved reading the journal articles, I loved the discussions in the lab and at lab meetings. I loved just using my hands, I loved the physical challenge of doing things that are very small. Anyway, that was all quite wonderful. And so I worked for two years in the lab and then went to graduate school.

Now I don't think when I graduated from high school I would've had any idea (a) that I was going to go to graduate school, or (b) if I were, what field of study. But coming out of my lab experience, I entered an anatomy program. And I would say not intending to do neurobiology or neuro-anatomy, I thought I would do cell biology. And I would say that while my pursuit has been neurobiology, it really is biology that intrigued me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I got to graduate school, and you got to spend all of your time reading about this thing for which you had an infinite curiosity and infinite enthusiasm, and you could talk to people who were studying and interested in the same things, that was just glorious. And so I think it really was that I had discovered this real-life manifestation of the thing I had been curious about since I was four or five years old -- you know, that it really finally came together. And as an educator, what you want for your students -- as a mother, what you want for your child -- is to find that thing, that pursuit that is intoxicating. Because when you fall in love with something, you can bring to it a level of commitment, a level of energy, level of curiosity, a level of persistence that is absolutely required for success. You just can't have success without that.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

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