Coincidental IntersectionsPosted on January 20, 2009 Dr. William A. Vega describes his journey from factory worker to researcher. |
I was not even an academic major in high school. I went to a ghetto school in LA high school and basically just was a push-out with a degree and actually spent time working in factories in LA, et cetera.
And I finally decided, well, I had to do something with my life a little bit better than that. Of course, I'm from the Vietnam era, so that was a big impulse to go to college, right? But it basically was almost accidental and circumstantial in the way it all came about that I even went to college.
Once I was in college, I hopped around a little bit and ended up at UC Berkeley finishing my undergraduate. I went other places, too, like Oregon, but I finished at UC Berkeley and my undergraduate, and I was there when it was really exciting. And so all the motivation that came from what was going on and all of the movements of the period including the farmworkers movement in California, including the ethnic movements, the various kinds: civil rights, ethnic studies.
And I was one of the people that actually negotiated the Ethnic Studies Program at Berkeley when it first started, and I taught in it when I had absolutely nothing to teach. But I taught in it in the very beginning of my career before, when I was still all but dissertation.
But that didn't really get me into NIH research, that just got me through college. And it happened coincidentally that I decided I had a felt need that I wanted to go into research, especially health-related research because I'd seen a lot of disease and problems in my family because I came from a low income family. And my father was a farm worker and later a gardener, and my mother had tuberculosis when I was three. So I just lived with different family members most of my early life, and that was one of the reasons why I didn't have a very good educational experience.
So that was a very strong motivation for me, to go into something associated ultimately with health-related research. But I wasn't trained in health-related research. I was actually trained in criminology, sociology; however, I had a lot of exposure to it because those are multi-disciplinary fields which these are too that we're operating within now. I mean, we dealt with everything: psychiatry, sociology, psychology, anthropology, et cetera.
These were all fields that intersected into what I was studying, so that it was very easy for me, then, to transfer that into the kind of research I did in this area, which is mostly epidemiology and services-related research. And many of the same populations, of course, because as everyone knows, when you're looking at substance abuse, you're really dealing with social deviance, you're dealing with people that have collections of risk factors.
I had the good fortune of having mentors who happened to find me or I found them, one way or the other, almost coincidentally. And they were great people who gave me a lot of insights and a lot of connectedness through networks, and I learned very quickly that that's the only way you can jump over the hoops successfully.
So it's very clear from my experience that it's not just an issue of cumulative knowledge, it's also a question of cumulative awareness of how networks can operate to facilitate your career.
And when that happened, when I had those kinds of mentorship associations and they plugged me into the right places, I was able to leap much more rapidly forward in accelerating my career, getting research grants, and all the rest of that.