Here’s a quick recollection on how I stumbled into my life’s work. Now, one might think that one would give considerable thought to what would do in life. Serious people likely did so. For example, just last night I was chatting with the son-in-law of my good female friend (he and his family are here visiting). He is a Brit (my friends daughter lives with him and their family outside of London). In terms of occupational choice, he is in finance (a hedge-manager type, I believe) and doing quite well. So, I asked him (David) if he had always known that was what he wanted to do and be since he did not grow up in a wealthy family. He smiled and told me he started his own personal bank accounts when he was about 8 or 9 years old. Yup, he knew right from the beginning.

Not yours truly, I was still rolling around in the mud at that age. If I had any longer-term ambitions back then, it was along the lines of being a cowboy, an athlete, or maybe an astronaut. The last avocation was due to the popularity of a TV and book series hero … Tom Corbett (space cadet). Nope, like all else in my aimless life, I bumbled my way into a career by chance … absent any thought or planning. How did that happen? How in God’s name did I manage to avoid debtor’s prison and a life of penurious desperation? As best I can recall, it went something like this 😳.

In college, I had to pick a major. Psychology appeared a good choice, not because I had any particular interest in the topic, I didn’t. But it was the best academic department at Clark University. After all, this is where Freud gave his American lectures and where the American Psychological Association was founded. So, why not! Besides, it did not demand a great deal of math, an academic discipline I avoided like the plague.

I liked the classes in my major well enough. Apparently, I was even tagged as an up and comer in the field since I was awarded a summer NIH grant for promising undergraduates. This award paid me to do original research under the mentorship of a senior faculty member and were rationed out with considerable care … only 4 were awarded each year. How I got one remains another freaking mystery in my life.

But I knew soon enough that psychology was not in my future though I did get as far as asking my advisor where I might pursue a doctorate in the subject. He immediately responded … Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. I thanked him for his input and quickly exited his office. Did he have me confused with some smart kid? Wow, I never would have guessed he was taking hallucinatory drugs.

I kept thinking, being a psychologist? Really? If I were a therapist, I’d have to listen to people whine all day. I’d likely whack them across the face and tell them to buck up. Becoming a researcher or teaching psychology had some merit, though such an ambition seemed beyond my reach. The advantage of that route, though, was that I could avoid people for the most part.

But reality whacked me upside the head during an unfortunate ending to my summer research project. I had to kill off my lab subjects at the termination of the project. Fortunately, they were rodents and not humans. Unfortunately, some were rather large by this point. As I sent one reluctant subject to his heavenly reward by plunging a needle containing some kind of poison into his stomach, he struck back by peeing in my face. That put a definite damper on my psychology research dreams (and on my puss).

Still totally rootless and directionless, I drifted off to the Peace Corps for two years in India. As my tour unfolded, I got a bit serious about the future. I took the SATs (in Delhi) and actually submitted an application for a Master’s program at the University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee. I think I chose the school because that’s where I did most of my PC training. I never looked far beyond my immediate environment. I chose the subject area, Urban Affairs, by mistake. I thought it would help me score with urban women. However, it turned out to be a set of classes in sociology, economics, and political science that focused on cities. But that was okay. It didn’t force me into a pigeon hole and kept my options open.

At the same time, the program did not prepare me for any particular vocational path. If I was confused about what an urban affairs expert did, so was everyone else. So, it took me a while to find remunerative employment when I was finally forced to look for a job. One day, a professor that I had worked with asked me to accompany him to Madison, the State Capital. We met with some state officials on some long-forgotten issue. My unemployment problem came up over lunch, and our state hosts arranged to give me a civil service employment application, which I completed and returned (and then promptly forgot about).

Weeks later, and after a trip East still looking for work, I got a call from my professor friend. He said I had a job interview in Madison the very next day. But when I inquired about the nature of the work, all he knew was a time and a location. I dutifully showed up and discovered it was a 3-person civil service interview for the position of Research Analyst-Social Services. I laughed quietly … I knew little about either research and less about our system of social services. This should be mercifully quick, I thought.

Weeks later, I get a call from the hiring supervisor in the Wisconsin Department of Health & Social Services. I was number 3 on the hiring list. Go figure. So, I head to Madison again while thinking this will at least be a good experience. After all, wouldn’t they hire someone actually qualified to do the job? Stunningly, she called me back to offer me the position. I had just made the 3rd place on the list, the final candidate who could be interviewed by the person making the hiring decision, because someone else had dropped out. This hiring supervisor said the candidates got better the further down the list she went. I told her it was a damn good thing she couldn’t get to number 4, they must have been dynamite. Immediately after that, I was also offered a job back East. I always wondered how my life might have turned out had the sequence been reversed.

In any case, that’s how I got into human services and research. Essentially, it was an accident. After several years (and a couple of promotions), I was asked by my boss to assist a professor from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He was preparing a large grant proposal for a research project into welfare decision-making that only could be submitted for federal funding through a state agency. Few in the bureaucracy could imagine that an egghead could contribute anything of worth to their program efforts. Thus, they chose a low life like me to work with him. It wasn’t worth the time of anyone important.

For me, it was just another task. I rather enjoyed my State work. Civil service in the 1970s was respected (in Wisconsin). Most of my colleagues were dedicated and sharp. In addition, my agency was involved in several remarkable and revolutionary undertakings, some of which I played a role in initiating. Nevertheless, I got a call at the end of a work day several weeks down the line, long after I had forgotten the professor and his project. To my surprise, it was this very professor asking if I’d consider coming to the University to help him run this logistically complicated project grant he had just been awarded. I thought about it for 5 or 6 seconds before responding … oh hell, why not? I should note that not everyone thought this a smart move … I was giving up a civil service position for something that looked temporary and highly uncertain.

Now, I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specifically at the nationally recognized Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). By some miracle, I fell into the center of intellectual thinking on human service issues. Of course, without a doctorate, I was at the bottom of the heap. But I soon (more accurately, eventually) got the union card (a Ph.D.) and was on my way to an absolutely fabulous and fulfilling career.

And yet, as I wrote just a few blogs ago, I never embraced fully the academic world. I remained in academia but never embraced the culture. I went with my first love … being a policy wonk who found academia a perfect platform for doing what I loved in the manner that fit my idiosyncratic personality. I thought of myself as a free-lance policy tinkerer and a curious explorer of the toughest social challenges of that era. I also got to pick my own issues, function independently, and work with the best and brightest (in academia and government). It was like being in a candy store where I could indulge my intellect, satisfy my values, and cater to my innate disposition to make a difference in the world. And I got to pass on my ‘wisdom’ to the next generation of students. Perfect.

Somehow, without any sense of direction or planning, I managed to end up in a perfect spot in life. How did I get so fortunate? I’m not sure. Perhaps just going with the flow, not forcing things or overthinking, has merit. Typically, I went with those things that simply felt right. Either that or it was the luck of the Irish.