I Broke All the Rules Posted on February 28, 2006 Oscar A. Barbarin (bio) shares how he has approached his career development.

My own career path, at least the path that has led me up to this point, is checkered; it is mixed. It is not at all linear. I broke all the rules. Think about every rule that your mentor will tell you; I've broken just about every one.

I pursued things that I was interested in. All the choice points, all the choices I've made along the way were as much driven by personal commitments as they were by any interest in furthering my own career. So what I'm saying when I broke all the rules is I often made decisions that could have and in some instances did work against my own professional advancement.

I'll start with the notion that many research scholars are trained to have a research area that they are committed to, that they pursue, they develop, they stick with in a linear way. And there are certain good reasons for that, because problems are so complex, methods are difficult, that one needs to develop skills in a particular area.

Well, I was a generalist. I was trained in clinical psychology; I was trained as a behaviorally-oriented therapist. I really wasn't driven by having an academic career initially. I got seduced by it little by little.

I came to realize that I was really interested in the research. I was very conceptually-oriented; I like to think. In a way much like Paulo Freire who says that simply reflection by itself is no good, it's empty and action that is unguided by reflection. You have to join the two, reflective action.

And that is the model I really had. You act; you step back, and you think; you reflect; you do research, and then you try to implement it. You use it in some way and further test your idea and then step back and reflect on it.

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