I Never Thought I'd Be an Academic Posted on March 1, 2006 Irwin Sandler (bio) tells early-career people to expect the unexpected.

You should expect the unexpected. One of the ironies of my career, and it really goes back to my college days is I never thought I'd be an academic. It was one of the things I ruled out when I was in college because I always felt more driven by a sense of social values, of wanting to do good rather than, not rather than, as well as wanting to understand because I've always been intellectually curious, and I think I'm sort of intuitively intellectual, but my real values were, "How do you make a difference in the world?"

I thought the last people in the world who are making a difference are these college teachers who are talking to me. That was my view. Even in graduate school, that was my view. Even when I really got turned on to prevention and preventive mental health, as I said before, I didn't even consider that I wanted to do this academic thing. I wanted to work in the community.

So I had that pretty well settled in my mind. I did it for a couple of years, but after doing it for a couple of years, it really bothered me that I wasn't able to ask the questions I wanted to ask. That was a major change for me, and I looked around at what kind of settings could I ask the questions I wanted to ask, do the things I wanted to do, and it seemed like an academic setting was a possibility. Frankly, when I went into it, I went into it tentatively, thinking it wouldn't last.

I guess that the constant has been I've always been sort of inner-directed in the sense I've always felt it was important to follow what turns me on, to follow my passion. So when I really thought that I wanted to be in a setting that paid you to think, and that's really what academia does.

Academia, at least in the College of Liberal Arts, ultimately is an amazing privilege. It's the only place where they just pay you to think and given that you can convince people that what you think is interesting. That's all you have to do, and they pay you, and they give you time. It's a good deal. That's sort of how I got hooked into the academic game.

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