Not Your Usual Career Path Posted on May 2, 2006 Ellen Frank (bio) talks about how her master's in English literature led to a PhD in psychology.

My undergraduate degree was in drama. I did a master's in English literature, and in about 1973, a group of 27 individuals came from New Haven to found the new Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. At that time, I had a talk show on women's issues on the local CBS affiliate, and I invited one of this crew of 27, Carol Anderson, at that time a famous family therapy expert, to come and talk about family therapy and how it could help women, and so on.

She went back to the new chair of the department and the new director of research and said, "I've found our new research assistant." So I went to work for these people and was pretty fascinated by ... growing up in Pittsburgh, one actually didn't know that there was a psychiatry that was separate from psychoanalysis, so the idea that there was a science of psychiatry was something that would never have occurred to me.

So when I understood what these folks were doing, I have to say I was completely fascinated, and they kept pursuing me. "When are you going to come to work for us? When are you going to come to work for us?" And finally, Dr. Kupfer's secretary called me and said, "Dr. Kupfer said you wanted to make an appointment to see him," and I thought, "I give up. I'll go. You know, let's get this over with."

But I realized that there really was a potentially very interesting job there, so I started rewriting their papers, fixing up their references, but every now and then I'd come in and say things like, "Well, I've done everything you've asked me to, but I just wonder if what's really going on here might not be, that it's not about the treatment, but it's about the gender, and is there a way to go back and redo these analyses?"

And I would ask question after question like this, and I think finally, just to shut me up, they gave me a data set that they had brought from New Haven that no one was analyzing, and they gave me a statistician to work with, so I wrote that paper up, and it got accepted for publication, no, so I wrote the data up, and it got accepted for presentation at the American Psychiatric Association.

I thought, "This is a pretty easy game. I think I'll play this game for awhile," and soon realized that I was not going to have much credibility as a psychiatric researcher with an undergraduate degree in drama and a master's in English, so I decided to pursue the Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

As a first-year graduate student, the National Institute of Mental Health put out a request for proposals for applications to study rape victimization. As part of my TV work on women's issues, I had actually been involved in the founding of the rape crisis center in Pittsburgh, so I had already well-established relationships with the board of directors and the staff of the local rape crisis center, so this new chair of psychiatry thought, "I'll bet Ellen can do this grant."

So knowing absolutely nothing about how to write a grant, I sat down and, with their mentorship and a young collaborator, wrote a grant application to study treatments for recent victims of sexual assault. It didn't get funded, but we got very encouraging pink sheets.

We rewrote the grant, and as a second-year graduate student, I had $350,000 a year in research funding, so it's a kind of odd career path in the sense that unexpected things opened doors for me that led down this path, but one could never have planned this career, never in a million years.

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