Pharmacy to Psychology Posted on January 28, 2008 Margaret Beale Spencer (bio) describes how recognizing resilience provided motivation for her journey from student to researcher.

I really have had an interesting career in a sense of how I began in this area. I was a basic science undergraduate student, and in fact I had planned to go to medical school. What's consistent in terms of my early experiences in my preparation and where I am now really is the area focus, and that is I've always been committed and interested in how to maximize the experiences of young people. So if I'd gone into medicine, I planned to go into pediatrics, so here I am as a developmental psychologist, developmental science person, but having had a history in an area that focused on children.

In fact as I worked in a hospital as a pharmacist and I worked, I focused a lot on kids who were very, very ill in terms of understanding what they were experiencing with their families and stumbled into observing resilience. And I did not know what I was looking at.

That's all I knew was that children were doing well in terms of their emotional sort of adjustment to the situation much more than their families were. And I was really amazed at how this might be, and I began taking a couple of classes in psychology and moved into psychology and was very lucky enough to obtain a fellowship to study at the graduate level.

So in many ways, it’s not a traditional undergraduate experience in psychology, moving into graduate school. It was sort of atypical, but it certainly helped me to maintain an interest in understanding resilience. How do people manage to do well, either emotionally or in fact just behaviorally, in terms of life outcomes in the face of lots of challenges? And that has really basically been the source of my motivation to continue in this field all these years.

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