|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
View Interview with Susan Hockfield
View Biography of Susan Hockfield
View Profile of Susan Hockfield
View Photo Gallery of Susan Hockfield
|
|
|
Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
View Interview with Susan Hockfield
View Biography of Susan Hockfield
View Profile of Susan Hockfield
View Photo Gallery of Susan Hockfield
|
|
|
Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: I loved to read as a kid. In fact, I was raised in a household where classic Persian literature and poetry was revered and prized. Both of my folks were really into it and they got us into it. In fact as a kid, I grew up around the likes of Saadi and Hafez and Omar Khayyam and Rumi and people like that. And I really discovered the novels at a little bookshop in Kabul, because there is not a great tradition of novel writing in Persian literature, certainly not in Afghanistan. There is a great tradition, an ancient tradition of poetry, but not of prose novel. So I discovered Western novels, though translated into Farsi, at a local little bookshop in Kabul, and it was there that I read my first novels. I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I was in wonderland. I think they had these condensed young adult editions of classics like Don Quixote and Ivanhoe and Treasure Island, and I remember reading all of those and just falling in love with the format. And then they also had serialized novels that they would publish in magazines, and I was really a sucker for those as well. So I really fell in love with prose at that time and I began writing my first short stories at that age. I was probably eight or nine years old when I began writing. I really loved it, and I was really passionate about it. I felt so in my element when I was writing. And pretty much since then, I haven't stopped writing. It is really kind of when my history of writing began.
View Interview with Khaled Hosseini
View Biography of Khaled Hosseini
View Profile of Khaled Hosseini
View Photo Gallery of Khaled Hosseini
|
|
|
Ron Howard
Oscar for Best Director
Ron Howard: I became intrigued by what the director did primarily because when I was working on the show -- The Andy Griffith Show -- the actors, they were a blast. I had so much fun hanging around with them. They were interesting, they were smart, they were funny. They were playing practical jokes, then on a dime, they could focus and do great work. And even as a kid, I was impressed with these people. But I also really enjoyed spending time with the crew. They'd let me sit up there and work the camera or learn a little something about sound, how the microphone worked, and placement, and lighting, and things like that. And I enjoyed that time. And, after a while, I realized that the director was the one person who, moment to moment, day in and day out, really got to play with everybody. And the job just started to look very, very good to me.
View Interview with Ron Howard
View Biography of Ron Howard
View Profile of Ron Howard
View Photo Gallery of Ron Howard
|
| |
|
