Laura Schulz
Primary Investigator
I started being interested in children and learning at age six when I tried to train my then three-year-old sister to read by bribing her with cookies. Seven cookies later, she quit and went outside to play. She eventually became literate but I have been suspicious of behaviorist models of learning ever since.
I graduated from public high school in Ohio curious about the mind, interested in children, and with no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I attended the University of Michigan where I was lucky enough to take my first philosophy class with the incomparable Elizabeth Anderson. I promptly became a philosophy major. A few years later, I graduated college even more curious about the mind, interested in children, and certain that I didn’t want to work in the ivory tower. (Life is full of ironies.)
I spent the next seven years ahm … growing up, working part time, seasonal jobs with no health benefits in oh so many places. Passing quickly over the temp work and bakery jobs, I worked as an aid in a Montessori elementary school, a shift worker in a parent/child Head Start, a camp counselor for kids from housing projects in Washington DC, a naturalist in outdoor science schools in California and Oregon, an after school program director in Clackamas county housing projects, a facilitator of a middle school girls’ program for the YWCA, and an experiential educator for North Portland Youth and Family Services. I still think there was no better training for designing experiments than working with kids who had no reason to work with you unless you turned whatever you wanted to teach into something genuinely fun and engaging.
By my late twenties I realized I needed a “real job” (yes I ended up as a graduate student; life is full of ironies). But first, I tried working as a development assistant in a non-profit. I got fired a year later (alright, actually I quit before they could fire me) after I sent out a mass mailing without postage and a mountain of envelopes ended up back on my desk marked “Return to Sender”.
It was time to think about going back to school. I learned about developmental psychology -- and in particular, the idea that people actually studied children’s ideas about the world -- through a Barron’s Guide to Graduate School at the library. I enrolled in a statistics class at Portland Community College and a research methods class at Portland State University and remembered how much I loved being a student.
But by then, I was living in Portland, Oregon and committed to staying there. I had met my partner, Sue, shortly after college and became a parent to three amazing children, then ages five, nine and fifteen. (I am now a parent to four amazing children. My youngest was born in Boston in 2007.) So I only applied to programs where I could, in principle, commute. As it happened, the University of Oregon and Washington required students to be on campus five days a week. By contrast, Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley said “Come! We’ll figure it out.”
I went to Berkeley. For four semesters, I flew down at 6 AM Tuesday morning and was in class by 10 AM; I left Thursday morning and was home in time to pick up my son from elementary school. (Crazy yes but possible back then. It was pre-9/11, flights were $89/round trip -- and in those pre-Portlandia days, commuting from Portland was cheaper than living in Berkeley). After that I commuted down only for a few days every six to eight weeks and did all my research in daycares in Portland.
When I got the job offer from MIT in 2005, my friends in Oregon asked me if I knew what the “T” stood for. They knew I couldn’t work a corkscrew. I was terrified for the first six months. If you ever have imposter syndrome, trust me, I’ve been there. But I’ve worked many jobs and there is just nothing whatsoever like this one. I am incredibly lucky in my colleagues and the work I get to do -- and incredibly lucky in the family and friends who have supported me in doing it. If you are passionate about science, ideas, children and learning -- you belong here.