By MARTY LEVINE
Editor’s note: “Lasting Lessons” presents stories from faculty and staff about an educational moment that made the most impact on their lives — as a student or an instructor, inside a classroom or out, here at Pitt or elsewhere, formal or impromptu, between friends or even at a bad moment — something that challenged or changed them. Look for more Lasting Lessons in future editions of the University Times.
Laurel Roberts, senior lecturer, Department of Biological Sciences, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
“I was all set to be a zookeeper,” Laurel Roberts remembers of her days just out of the University of Pennsylvania. She had grown up feeling the impulse to sit in the back of every class, reticent to be noticed, and liked animals “more than I liked people,” she recalls.
So she got a job at the Pittsburgh Zoo — and then married the zookeeper, which made her ineligible to work in the one place that employed zookeepers, she says: There were anti-nepotism rules at time.
“I’m old enough that there were a limited number of career options: nurse, teacher, secretary or Ms. Right,” she says of those times in the 1970s. “My father suggested that I apply to Pitt because it was a steady job, good pay.”
She was hired by the experimental pathology department in the medical school, and worked in several labs, but became frustrated, not feeling she had a voice in their proceedings. If only she had more letters after her name, like the lab director …
She decided to get her master’s degree here. Maybe, she thought, “he would listen to me more.”
“I came in just to get the credentials — to find a better job or just get more satisfaction out of my current job. It wasn’t that long after they had created the biological sciences department” from courses previously housed elsewhere.
One day, she remembers, after she’d become a teaching assistant, she was attempting to explain Mendelian genetics in class to one particular student.
“This kid — we were not on the same page. I don’t think he thought I had much to offer him and I didn’t think I had much to offer him.” But it was on about the third or fourth attempt that, suddenly, “I looked at him and I saw the light go on in his eyes. He got it. He understood it. And at that moment I fell in love with teaching.
“Anybody who has known me for a long time knows that I am actually very shy,” Roberts says. “So it was a shock to everyone who knew me; the idea that I could stand and talk in front of hundreds of people every day of my professional life was ludicrous.”
Now, “I am a specialist in very large classes,” she says. “I can walk into a class with 300 undergraduates and teach. Not just talking at them. I actually enjoy teaching in a larger classroom. That feeling I got of falling in love is the thing that has refreshed me and motivated me for 30 years.
“I see them as freshmen ... little ducklings just running around,” she says of her introductory course students. “Then,” one day, as she teaches them again in later courses, “they know who they are and who they are supposed to be. I knew I needed to keep on finding out how to do it.
“To see the joy and the enthusiasm and the rigor once they find out who they are supposed to be — and this doesn’t happen with everyone — but I experienced this myself, helping the ducklings find their water.”
Charles Darwin, she notes, was going to be a doctor like his father, but he apparently didn’t like blood, or people. He considered the priesthood. Then, right out of college, “he was offered the position on the HMS Beagle, and it changed the world. I like to tell my students, everything seems so important now, but you don’t know the pivotal moment, when it might happen or how.”
Mark Paterson, professor and director of undergraduate studies, Department of Sociology, Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences.
“Every once in a while somebody comes along and wants to engage in learning for a reason — and when that happens it’s refreshing and keeps us motivated,” says Mark Paterson of his students at Pitt. “One of these people, every now and again, and we know that the future is not lost.”
Paras Chand, an undergraduate just a few years ago, was one of those students, taking sociology as part of his pre-med coursework.
“We get plenty of medical track students,” Paterson says. “They come to sociology, they do a sociology track of courses, they complain about it — but once in a while there is a student who comes along and does very well, is very community-engaged.”
And Chand was genuinely concerned about issues of public health, Paterson says. In fact, Chand already had a research idea, on which Paterson was happy to help. The pair looked at cigarette brand advertisements in The Pitt News and the daily press in Pittsburgh from 50 years ago and earlier, charting the ways in which students had been targeted by advertisers, including by “advertorials”: editorials from “any cool person on campus talking about their own experience with a particular brand of cigarettes.”
Chand earned a summer undergraduate research award from Pitt for this effort and expanded his study’s database to include the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The final product addressed the sneaky way advertisements are done and demographics targeted.
It was time to see if this student was ready for the next step, Paterson thought. He suggested Chand pursue a bachelor of philosophy, a B.Phil. degree — a relatively rare undergraduate degree choice that involves a dissertation-length project and final presentation to a faculty committee, overseen by the honors college.
“It elevates your regular degree with a significant research component,” Paterson notes, and it helped to propel Chand to acceptance in a master’s program at Cambridge, and then medical school and a clinical placement, all the time receiving recommendation letters from Paterson.
“This was a student who had a most intense Pitt experience and I was extremely proud of him,” Paterson says. “We are still in contact. He checks in every now and then.”
In fact they met again while Chand was writing essays in preparation for his medical school applications — in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Paterson visits family several times a year. There they climbed Arthur’s Seat — an extinct volcano, 50 feet higher than Pittsburgh’s Mt. Washington, that offers a splendid view of the country’s capital below, the coastline and the Pentland Hills next to the city.
The journey takes several hours, with pathways through the green and some “scrambling around rocky trails” at the top. The pair talked about “all of the experiences,” Paterson remembers — “the essays he was writing, what it was like in Cambridge, his memories of Pitt, who else he had been in contact with, his gratitude for my concern for his future outcomes ... and his concern for public health.
“And he brought me presents. That was one of the most touching moments.
“There are plenty of students, you ask them about their intentions and it is usually about money or ambition,” he adds. “His intentions were all about serving other people. His intentions were all — selfless.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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