I dropped out of college a couple of times when I was younger for a variety of reasons. It just wasn't working for me, and I just started working with kids. I just left school, and I was in upstate New York, and I grew up in New York City, and I just left the east coast and went to the west coast as people do from New York and arrived in Davis, CA for reasons I could go on and I won't. I knocked on the door of a childcare center and said, "I wonder if you need some help."

They took me in as a volunteer. I asked if I could work at the university as a student, and they told me I needed to apply, which I didn't realize, but of course I realized I should do that. It took me a few more years, and I got back in school, and then I wrote my own major. These were back in the days of the early 70s. The point is that I don't advise this to people, but I took an active control over my learning because it just wasn't working for me in college. I just wasn't interested. It might have been a mistake, whatever, but it's what I did.

By the time I came out of it, I had my undergraduate degree. I had worked with kids for 3 or 4 years in daycare centers, Head Start and daycare, and I knew I wanted to work with kids. It's the one thing I knew. I didn't know what I wanted to do with kids and all, and so I just kept working with kids, residential treatment centers. By the time I went to grad school at the University of Kansas, I had worked with kids for about 6 or 7 years in a variety of roles, and at that point, I decided I wanted to be a researcher.

I did a retooling in mid-career, and my first research career was around subtypes of aggression, and I developed with some colleagues an analog task, computer analog task, and we were studying different types of aggression, and I'd gotten funded to do that. And that looked like that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life, and I guess I just got tired of that, and I started getting back involved in schools, and I felt like I found my niche, that whether I was good or bad or whatever, this was what I wanted to do.

I just got very determined and very focused; this was what I wanted to do, and I worked really hard to develop it. I don't know how people would view that, or whether that's helpful or not, but I think when you get the opportunity to figure out what it is that you want to do instead of what people tell you you should do or you think you should do, I do think it gives you a focus, and it gets you sort of a mission.

Yeah, I think passion's a good word for it. It's a commitment. It's a sense of mission, and I don't mean that in a grandiose way, but it's a real sense of purpose of I believe in our goals. I'm not sure that we're doing it the right way. We're doing it the best way we can, and I feel very good about the work we're doing because we're really thinking hard and giving it the best we can, and I suppose there's a passion there. I think that's a good word for it; that wouldn't be there if I didn't believe so much in that this was something that I feel strongly is the kind of work I want to be doing.