Harvard Anthropology Professor Joseph P. Gone was recently featured in a Harvard Gazette article, "How they found the work they were ‘meant’ to do," which explores the many ways current faculty members discovered their scholarly callings.
From West Point to Harvard (via Potok, Freud, and rats), Gone shares:
During an undergraduate holiday break, I returned home to Kalispell, Montana, for a brief respite from the rigors of cadet life at the U.S. Military Academy. West Point was the epitome of a mind-numbing, pre-professional education, though my psychology courses had been captivating. In Kalispell, I plucked a book off the shelf at our public library: Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” (1967). This novel features a friendship between two Jewish youths in New York, one the son of an ultra-orthodox Hasidic rabbi. This son, Danny Saunders, was expected to one day assume his father’s role in the community’s religious dynasty, but instead he secretly fell in love with the works of Sigmund Freud. Later, in college, he studied psychology, only to learn that running rats through mazes was the trend; Freud was unwelcome in the curriculum.
In that moment, I had an epiphany: Psychology is a capacious field, inclusive of theoretical questions about human nature, scientific questions about laws of behavior, and applied questions about helping others in distress. In short, psychologists could practice both psychoanalysis and rat-running. Not long thereafter, I transferred to Harvard College to study psychology.
Read stories shared by other Harvard faculty: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/12/how-they-found-the-work-they-were-meant-to-do/
Photo Credit to Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard Staff Photographer.