Research Career Quotes

I was a mere 29-year-old instructor at Kyoto, enjoying daily research work with some young students. Nothing had prepared me to be a professor at a major national university. Being too young and inexperienced to be a Full Professor, I was first appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

My 6 years with Murdoch were pivotal for my entire research career.

I'd like to be an academic, a philosophy lecturer if possible. I'd do a Masters in Ancient Hebrew maybe, and a Ph.D. hopefully, if I get in.

I just wanted to be a scientist.

If my dramatic career doesn't work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and other motor neuron diseases. It's a very exciting field of research. But I'd like to continue in drama, so it wouldn't be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle.

C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.

After qualifying for a B.Sc. in pharmacology, I spent a few months in Sheffield University as a research worker in the pharmacology department but then went back to Oxford to the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in order to study for a D. Phil. with Dr. Geoffrey Dawes.

I was hoping I was going to get an ulcer. I was hoping to boost my research career by developing a bleeding ulcer.

At the time I finished high school, I was determined to study biology, deeply convinced to eventually be a researcher.

My scientific career has developed on three continents: Asia, Europe and North America.

After a subsequent interview at Brooklyn Poly, I was hired, and life as a fully independent researcher began.

I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background.

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

When I was in grad school, I wanted to be in academia forever.

I do not practice clinical medicine and hence do not treat individual patients. My career is in medical science.

Towards the end of the military service, I had to make what I assume has been the most important decision in my career: to start a residency in clinical medicine, in surgery, which was my favorite choice, or to enroll into graduate school and start a career in scientific research. It was clear to me that I was heading for graduate school.

I wasn't tempted to go into academia for a second.

I served as Dean until 1974, when I stepped down to return to full time teaching and research.

The Ph.D. system was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it's fine. But the trouble is that it's become a kind of a meal ticket - you can't get a job if you don't have a Ph.D.

I think I may have too much of a scientific mindset and am always looking for the caveats and qualifications in any situation. I never thought seriously of doing a PhD until relatively late in the day. I was always diligent at the book-work at university but the brightest amongst my friends all seemed to have a more intuitive grasp of the subject.

Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

Not everybody is talented for doing research. I think many women prefer to look for an easier job after their dissertations because it is very demanding. You have to be mobile. You have to move to different places for your post-doc training. And if you aren't successful, it isn't a very pleasant job, either.