Strange Corners and Trajectories Posted on February 28, 2006 John Landsverk (bio) describes his convoluted path to becoming a research scientist

My career path is a strange one. It has a lot of muddling through and strange corners and trajectories. Early on I became interested in mental health because of severe mental illness in my family, very close to my family.

That was very formative. It was back in the days when we had state mental hospitals and things like that, so when I was going to college, there were some major crises around that and getting care for a family member. It was very influential long-term for me. It got me very interested in thinking about mental illness in quite a different way.

My wife at the time said when we were going up north to visit her parents that live on a lake, she said, "Well, what do you like to do?" I said, "What I really like to do is read books and talk to people about ideas." She said, in parentheses, because neither one of us comes from any kind of professional academic background, she says, "Well, how do you get paid to do that?" I said, "I think if you become a professor maybe. I think that's how you get paid to read books and talk about ideas." So she said, "Well, OK. Why don't you explore that?"

So I went and explored it with an old professor, and he said, "Yeah, why don't you try a masters program in sociology?" Sociology was my undergraduate major, and I really liked it and all of that, so I entered the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota only intending to get my masters degree because I thought that's all you needed to teach at a small liberal arts college, and I had a couple in mind.

I did really well and finished the masters in one year, and by that time, I had understood that there was more to the game, and so I was encouraged to go on for a Ph.D. I didn't want to spend any longer than I had to, because nobody pays you much in graduate school, so I finished in two years. I went from the beginning of a masters to the end of a Ph.D. in three years, and then I took a job teaching at Hamline University, a small liberal arts college.

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