On the Road to Find Out: A Career Studying Lives

In the late 1990s, I lived in an Italian opera singer’s apartment in Berlin. I’m beginning with that because I mentioned it to a friend years ago, and he said, “If you ever write your autobiographical musings, you’ll need to include that bit.” My three years in Berlin as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development were incredibly formative in my life of studying lives. After a formal job interview, I landed there, completely ignorant of the stupendous opportunities it would provide. Sitting in my suite in a house in Vancouver on a rainy day, with a cup of tea in hand and a fire on, I wondered what was next for me after graduate school. MPI’s job ad sparked my interest. This institute across the sea seemed a place where people “thought like me”—where my focus on lives unfolding over time, a dynamic view of memory and the self, might be appreciated. I hadn’t heard of the Max Planck Institute, but I thought I would give it a shot.