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Did you want to do law while you were at Stanford or what made you sort of get into it?
I began my undergraduate years as basically a pre-med. I thought I was going to go into
medicine. I had had family members who had done that and it seemed like the most natural
thing to do. And I was reasonably good at the course work and so I eventually progressed
all the way through, graduated with a major, I applied to medical school. I had gotten
in. I had sent the deposit to hold my place. So after I left Stanford I had the good fortune
to go do some graduate study overseas and during that time I kind of finally kind of
took the step outside of my comfort zone and decided that medicine probably wasn't my true
passion.
Could you talk a little bit more about your study overseas and maybe how that affected
you a little bit?
So I went to Oxford and I was very lucky to get a scholarship there and I started in a
Ph.D. program actually, doing immunology research. Which at the time, and now too, was one of
the hottest fields in lab research. But I was unexcited by it. I think that's the easiest
way to put it. I just didn't really feel passionately about it. And so I felt, well, gee, if this
is sort of the hottest field with the hottest lab, etc., and I'm not excited, then that
should tell me something. So I take a step back and I ended up studying philosophy at
Oxford, which is a great place to study philosophy.
Were any of these transitions particularly challenging for you and difficult?
All transitions are challenging. They all are.
Many of us have dreams and passions and interests that are outside of what's kind of expected
of us, or what the path of least resistance might be.
And so for me the idea of pursuing law when nobody in my family had ever been a lawyer
and it was not something familiar to me, that seemed like a big step for me.
The thing in front of you -- your major, your job, whatever it is that you're doing, may
not be the thing that you are most truly passionate about. The thing you are passionate about
may be kind of over here. You see it, but you don't make it the center of your life.
And every once in a while you have to kind of make a decision to move those things that
are peripheral into the center. The difficult thing, I think, is to all the
time feel as if you are making those conscious choices about who you want to be and what
you want to do as opposed to simply following the path laid out for you appears to be, or
what others expect you to become. And I think, beginning with college and beyond you will
face this set of choices over and over again, and it's a hard thing.
Sometimes it's difficult for me to take criticism even from professors who I know are very bright
people.
Well, I don't think that ever goes away. No one likes to be criticized. But I think it's
important to have a healthy attitude towards it. The first thing I think is that one should
be open to criticism because it's entirely possible that the criticism could be correct.
But you should also be open to criticism partly because it's important to hear another person's
point of view. The other person wants to be heard. They want to register.
And even if you don't agree with them on one matter, the fact that they feel heard may
essentially invite them to engage in conversation with you again on some other matter where
they might be correct. And you would have lost the benefit of their view if they had
concluded that you were not someone who is inclined to listen.
You don't have to agree with everybody who criticizes you, you probably won't, but you
do have to listen conscientiously to what they have to say because that's part of the
process of being in dialog with other people. So I think this is a very important quality
to cultivate. And it sometimes requires having a thick skin. It sometimes requires you to
bite your tongue. But it's important to listen well, and it's a tough skill to acquire.