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Tim D. White
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
Tim White: In the University of California at Berkeley, we have perhaps the top undergraduates anywhere in the country, or at least a sample of the top undergraduates. These people come to me, and they have career aspirations, and they often ask the question, "How do I get into this business? What do I do when I'm in graduate school?" They are career-oriented. And what I tell them is to forget about that and go with your passion, and if you don't have a passion for this, then leave it, because you will need a passion. The financial rewards will not be great, the rewards have to come at times of discovery. You have to be excited by being the only human on the planet to see something for the first time, to understand something for the first time. "Develop a passion" is what I tell them, and "Don't go into it unless you are passionate about it." I think that pretty much applies widely to all fields of scientific endeavor.
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Tim D. White
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
What's interesting about the work that I do now is that it covers so many different fields. So I operate on some levels as a geologist, and on some levels as a biologist, and on others as a paleontologist. So I've never really been inclined to like labels. What I'm interested in is learning as much as I can about the past. Even as a child, even as that ten-year-old, I was fascinated on what came before. What was the history of these mountains? Who were the miners and the loggers and the explorers, and who came before them? And of course those were the Native Americans. And who came and what came before the Native Americans? Prehistoric mammals, as represented in the La Brea Tar Pits. I remember going there as a child and seeing these wonderful collections of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves and giant ground sloths. I was just fascinated in that world of the past, and how we might come to learn about it.
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Elie Wiesel
Nobel Prize for Peace
I read a lot. I teach my students, not creative writing, but creative reading and it is still from my childhood. You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind. And then you find clues that were left for you, really foredestined to be received by you from centuries ago. Generation after generation there were people who left clues, and you are there to collect them and, at one point, you understand something that you hadn't understood before. That is a reward, and as a teacher I do the same thing. When I realize there is a student there, in the corner, who understands, there is a flicker in the eye. That is the greatest reward that a teacher can receive.
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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
Lenny Wilkens: I started to get into basketball late. I played a half a year of high school basketball and played four years of college ball. I saw my first live pro game at the end of my senior year in college. It was the St. Louis Hawks playing the Boston Celtics for a championship. And I went with a friend and when I saw the excitement of the game, the fans, I saw the players out there, and I thought I could do that. And I never dreamt that I would be a professional athlete, let alone a professional coach.
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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
Lenny Wilkens: People. Working with young people. Helping them to maximize their ability because it helps them to become successful and it helps me to be successful. It helps the organization. But also, I feel if I can impart something lasting then they not only use it for their basketball, they take it off the court and they take it and they utilize it in giving back to society through their family and through how they interact in their community. And when I see that I feel real good about it. You see the growth. You see the development of a human being in addition to an athlete.
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