When I first started graduate school back in the 90's, my initial intention was to be in private practice. I wanted to be a clinician. And I wanted to work with underserved populations and the more I thought about this, it was going to be rather hard to maintain a private practice with underserved, because that's not an appropriate setting. I would need to be more in a community mental health center, because underserved populations generally are lower socioeconomic status backgrounds living in poverty could not afford to see clinicians in private practice.

But then I got involved in a research lab where science and research and asking interesting questions and trying to figure out what we call puzzles, was really fascinating to me and it became really reinforcing. So my intentions early on, again were to be in private practice, but I ended up in academia and that was a product of being in a very fun intellectually stimulating research lab. So that's how I ended up in academia.

At the University of Nevada, Reno, my academic and research mentor was William Follette and so he provided that seed, I guess, in being curious, regardless of topic. Because at the lab I was in wasn't driven by one topic like Latino mental health or adolescent depression; there was a lot of different students doing a lot of different projects. But what binded us together was this curiosity and wanting to ask really interesting, thoughtful, theoretically driven questions.