What was the impetus for your life's current direction?

What would I be when I grew up?  A mommy, a teacher, a nurse.  Yes.  Any of those would be fine.  Welllll, no.  As life moved on, I KNEW I did NOT want to be a teacher.  After all, my mom was a teacher and we were not at all alike.  I'd like to be a farmer or maybe a cow doctor - hmm - not girl things! 

I enrolled as a Home Ec.  major with a Religeous Education minor at a small Methodist college.  I could be a fine wife for some deserving guy and work in a church - - or purhaps change that minor.  At any rate, I would be able to get married and raise kids, etc., etc. 

There was one thing that I was 100% certain that I would never, ever do with my life, even on the brink of starvation: teach. The daughter of a gifted and dedicated college teacher, I spent years watching my mother make a deeper and deeper indentation into the couch. I heard her describe weekends in terms of how many grocery bags of papers she had graded, saw her single-handedly keep the Bic company in the black by purchasing red ink. By the time I knew the alphabet, I was put to work grading multiple-choice tests, and had memorized the curricula for most of her classes before I was ten. Each semester, our family "adopted" a few hundred teen-agers who weren't prepared to go to college any further away from home ("only child," my ***).

 When I’ve been going for days on end with little sleep and too much work.  When I’ve been getting yelled at by an asshole resident who wants to blame a medical student for not making them look good.  And when I feel I don’t have nearly enough time to study all the mountains of material I need to wade through, I sometimes wonder how I got here.

I was thirteen years old sitting on a bus, midway to the back, with about fifty other kids on a field trip to a NASA facility where rockets were tested and astronauts trained. I stared compulsively at the girl sitting in front of me. She wore small silver wire-rimmed glasses and her coarse dark-blonde hair hung to the base of her neck in an almost spherical curve, an unusually simple style for that time. The tour guide, a thick, middle-aged man who spoke with friendly-but-firm authoritativeness, posed a question: “Does anyone know why they always launch from Florida, and always towards the east?”

I was finishing out the last few months of a two-year research fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The research had been extremely promising, but NIST didn’t come through on its commitments to support my work, so I wasn’t able to purchase essential equipment and had to cobble together a kludge that was ultimately inadequate. I went to a job interview at the Naval Research Laboratory, hoping for a more supportive environment. I craved academic freedom more than anything. I spent a few hours talking to the other researchers and sizing up the facilities. At the end of my visit, the head guy sat down with me and gave me a short pitch for the job. “You’ll never get rich working here.