Academic Transition Quotes

In 1973, I was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Diego. Although I was certainly not unhappy at Nottingham, I had been there over twenty years from starting undergraduate studies to Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics, and I thought that a change of scene was worth considering.

In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

I was a dance major at NYU, but it wasn't working out. I had friends in the drama department, so I switched.

The truth is, for many young people, the changing schools or starting a new academic year is really difficult to deal with.

The war project at Stanford was essentially completed, and I accepted an offer of an Assistant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, which had a good biochemistry department.

I started high school in L.A., but I went to public school in New York.

After graduating in engineering I went to the University of Kansas to get an MA in economics as a vehicle for allowing me to decide if I wanted to continue in economics.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

If we learned all we needed to know in kindergarten, it was promptly drummed out of us in first grade.

It's maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn't that big of a transition.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

Having started in sciences, I then turned around and said, 'Oh, I don't want to do sciences. I want to do philosophy.' And to their credit my parents said, 'if that's what you want to do, then go for it'. Then I got the scholarship to Stanford, which was very nice for the parents to talk to their friends about.

In 1955, I got my degree in electrical-mechanical engineering. I realised, however, that my interest was less in practical applications than in the understanding of the underlying theoretical structure, and I decided to learn physics.

I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943.

I started in a business background, but then it was like, 'you know, I can't do math,' so I changed it to a liberal arts degree and got my Bachelor of Arts in Communications and it made sense.

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.

The same independence that got me into trouble in high school got me praise in college.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

I got an assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois, and I tore up my steno books.

I never went to school in England until I was 12.

I had an unorthodox high-school experience; I shifted around to different schools. When I got to college and met Larry Sacharow, who ran the theatre department [at Fordham University in NYC], he was the first person to say ‘I believe in you.’ At that point, I just needed someone to say ‘I see you, I get you, let’s go.’ It’s an amazing thing to borrow someone else’s confidence in you; it can change your life.

I went to eight different schools my first nine years of school.

In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study.

I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn't want to do it anymore.