Can anyone remember times when one of your grad school professors just dropped a statement in passing that completely oriented your approach to work for the rest of your life?

For me, there's a bunch. But this morning, I'm thinking of my first class in graduate school, which was an intro grad methods class taught by the great Alejandro Portes (what a privilege to learn from him!).

I remember he looked at all of us with a serious face, and said, "At Princeton, we are positivists, and if you are not a positivist then you have no business being here." I took him to mean empiricist and focused on cumulative knowledge contribution through empirics.

And I was like, "gulp" and became a pretty dedicated empiricst from then on in. I came into grad school having worked on "maximize the linear system" type of work prior to Princeton.

Well, enough reminiscing and I should get back to work. But what a privilege to be a scholar, and to learn from such smart, studied people, and eventually to have the privilege to be part of that tradition in some way!

I enjoyed those responses!