Where There's a Will, There's a Way Posted on January 9, 2008 Megan R. Gunnar (bio) reveals how her assertiveness as a student yielded positive results.

When I went to college I was going to be a music major, and I quickly decided that that was an avocation, not a vocation. So I decided that wasn’t enough of a passion to sustain me throughout a career, and I took a course in psychology, and I loved it. And I decided that gee, when my mind relaxed it was thinking about why people do what they do. That’s what I tended to think about, and I was fascinated by why people do what they do. So I shifted my major to psychology.

I had no idea that I would be spending my career trying to understand how biology and behavior are intertwined in the course of development, and it wasn’t until I took the required physiology course that was required to get a psych degree that I realized how passionately interested I found physiology. And I took an experimental course, because of course I had to, and I loved doing experiments. I think I would be a researcher in something, right?

If I had to give up doing what I’m doing, I’d want to do research in something, because I just love doing research. And part of this is, I believe if you’re going to have a career and it’s going to be successful, you’d better be passionate about what you’re doing, just love the process of doing it because you’re going to spend a lot of time just having to do the process.

I thought what I would be doing my work in was sex differences because in that experimental psych course, I was absolutely stunned when we got to studying sensory processes to recognize men and women were processing sensations differently, and this was the end of the ’60s, early ’70s. This was the women’s movement.

I was a student at a women’s college, and I thought, “God, it can’t all be socialized. I mean, there has got to be a story here, and this is really important, and I’m very interested in it.” And I started reading more, and I kept reading about hormone behavior work and the study of sex differences. And this name Eleanor Maccoby kept showing up, and she was at Stanford. And I thought, “Okay, they didn’t want me as an undergraduate. Maybe they’ll want me as a graduate student.”

I went down and talked to Sandra Bem. She looked at what I’d done as an undergraduate at a women’s college that didn’t have a strong research focus, and she says, “You’re not going to get in. You haven’t done research.” So I applied more broadly and went to Michigan my first year in developmental psychology.

It wasn’t the right fit for me. I was not used to snow and cold and oh, my God, it was awful. And I came back to Stanford as a research assistant, that summer. John Hagen — I owe him my life — arranged for me to work as a research assistant with Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, given what he knew my interests were.

At the end of the summer Carol said, “Well, why don’t you stay on as a research assistant?” and I looked at her and I said, “Well, I will if you’ll make me a graduate student.” I can’t believe I had the guts to say that. And she went to Eleanor, and Eleanor pulled strings. And they reviewed my case, and that fall I was a graduate student at Stanford. So where there is a will, there is a way, and I got my degree at Stanford working with Eleanor.

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