Staying in New Haven Posted on February 28, 2008 Pursuing tenure at your graduate institution is unusual, admits Peter Salovey (bio), but it worked out very well for him.

Early on in college knew I would major in psychology, I was finding it the most exciting classes that I was taking and had some great teachers at Stanford, and that excited me to major in psychology. I'd been a math and science student in high school and found that I could do science, but asked questions that I found more interesting with it in psychology.

And very, very early in college I had the experience of working in a laboratory. It was actually a cognitive psychology laboratory being run by a graduate student named David Rosenbaum, now professor at Penn State. And he was doing his dissertation, and he hired me to be a research assistant and that got my feet wet in psychology. And then I met some great mentors at Stanford. People like David Rosenhan and Albert Bandura and Phil Zimbardo and Gordon Bower and others who just continued to excite me about doing psychology. And David Rosenhan and I worked in the lab, did some experiments on how emotions affect helping behavior or altruistic tendencies, and that really helped me catch the research bug.

But when I finished college, I was fairly certain I wanted to go to graduate school. In fact, I had already applied and been accepted, but I needed a year I think to sort out some personal issues in my life and also I think recharge my batteries a little bit for graduate school. So I worked for a year between college and graduate school in the Bay Area and worked for a management-consulting firm that did communications skills training. So I actually taught writing primarily, but also negotiating and public speaking for companies in the Bay Area. One company we worked for was a small upstart computer operation that maybe had at the time about 75 employees. It was called Apple Computer, maybe you've heard of it.

And that year was great, because it convinced me I think of a couple of things. One that I really enjoyed teaching, because that's essentially what I was doing: I was teaching. But also that I wanted to work in a more academic environment. My mentors at Stanford said, "If you want to be a psychologist, go to Yale they'll turn you into one." That was a quote from David Rosenhan.

And so I headed off to Yale the next year. I wanted to work in the field and in the lab. I wanted to work on issues of clinical relevance, and Yale was a great place to go to graduate school because it had a very strong clinical program, had a very strong social program. This was the early 1980s, and it let me combine the two into a kind of personally-tailored Ph.D. program.

So I came to Yale, and I worked with multiple advisers in labs with Judy Rodin, with Dennis Turk, with Patty Linville, with Jerry Singer. And to me that was a great graduate education, working across subfield lines, having the experience of multiple mentors. I still think that's the way graduate students should be trained in psychology. Not narrow-gauged single lab apprenticeships, but much broader work across labs on multiple projects at the same time.

Well after all of that I did an internship at the West Haven VA Hospital in Clinical Health Psychology and then went on the job market. When I was looking for jobs in 1985, particularly if you were in clinical psych or social psych or health psych, and I was trying to position myself in all of them, a post doc wasn't so necessary. There were jobs for new assistant professors out there, and if you had published a bit as a graduate student, you would be competitive for them. So I looked for jobs, and I got offers at several universities, all of which I would have been happy going to.

But by that time I was about to be married and my wife did, does work, still does work in the urban public health, and so many of the job offers that I had at that moment as it happened were in quite rural settings. Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, Charlottesville, Virginia, Ithaca, New York and, Marta, my wife probably would have found something in those places, but it was going to be difficult if your area is urban public health with a particular focus on urban minorities. And so the last offer actually I got was Yale, and never really thought I would stay in New Haven. I don't necessarily recommend that one accept a faculty position where you were a graduate student because it means a change in relationships and roles that that isn't always completely smooth.

But it worked out for me, and Marta was able to continue her work. I was able to essentially continue literally working in the same lab I had been working in as a graduate student, but now the lab was mine and it worked out well for me.

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