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"In 1993-4, I went on the job market, looking at standard faculty positions. I received some offers, including one from Vanderbilt University, where I am now. But I was resisting accepting a position, and some friends - who were also on the job market at the time - sent me to a career counselor. The counselor's husband was a bench scientist, so she had some sense of my career until that point, and asked me a very simple question, one that I had never asked myself: "If you didn't have to worry about how much money you made, or what anyone else thought of you, what would you do?" What surprised me was that I knew the answer to that question: I'd be a student for the rest of my life.
When I said that, I realized that what I loved about being in science was knowing something today that no one knew yesterday, and that it didn't matter so much if I learned it by my own hands, or over coffee with a friend."
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