‘I Want to Be Remembered for Training a Lot of Good People’.
William DeJong Professor of Community Health Sciences
Age: 66
Hometown: Houston, Texas (“My dad was a petroleum geologist. I was born in Flagstaff, and we moved around the Four Corners area for a couple of years. Sometimes we were moving every six weeks. First through fourth grade I was in Denver, Colorado. Fifth grade we moved to Houston, Texas, and I graduated from high school there. So, when I think of a hometown, it’s Houston.”)
Breakfast: Two bananas
What led to your focus on mentoring?
I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. There’s a norm there that you could be the most brilliant researcher, but if you can’t teach well you will not get tenure. I had three faculty members who I worked with there—I was a psychology major—and they didn’t have a very active graduate school program, so for me as an undergraduate it was very easy to get involved in research and get a lot of one-on-one attention and mentorship.
When I went off to graduate school in psychology, that was not the case. I was very disappointed about it, and I just came out of that experience seeing the contrast. I pledged that if I ever did have doctoral students or master’s students I would make sure they had my time and attention. I would not ignore them ever.
Never?
When I found myself at the Harvard School of Public Health [now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health], I was an adjunct when our acting chair came to me and said, “I have a favor to ask of you. We have a doctoral student who needs an advisor, and there’s no one on the faculty who is willing to work with her. Will you do it?” I said, “Of course.”
I had a student call me recently, she’s in the DrPH program, and a couple of different faculty had recommended she get in touch with me. At the end of the conversation she asked if I would be her thesis advisor. I said, “After this last fall I promised my wife I wouldn’t take on any more doctoral students, so here’s the deal: The answer is yes, but you cannot tell my wife.” I just couldn’t say no!
I really believe that every student, no matter what, deserves my attention. As a result, when I was at Harvard at any given time I would have six or seven doctoral students. Here at SPH all of us are assigned advisees in the MPH program, and then we have our DrPH program, and at any given time I have six or seven doctoral students. I just enjoy it—it actually has been the thing that I find most gratifying in the work that I do.
Is there a big piece of advice you tend to give these students?
I always want them to hear that they’re young, and this idea that they should be able to pick the perfect career trajectory that will take them into their dotage is mistaken. It doesn’t work that way.
I tell them about my own experience, where I spent all this time as an undergraduate and in graduate school preparing to be a professor of social psychology. I did that for a year and quit. I got my doctorate when I was 27, and I didn’t even know what I wanted to focus on until I was 39. I kept moving, trying different things, picking up skills and knowledge along the way, and eventually it all came together and worked for me.
I tell them, “Don’t think about the long-term. What do you want to do next? What do you want to try?” If you find that you like it there and there’s a future for you there, then you’ll stay. Otherwise, you’ll look for the next thing. And, eventually, it will come together. So calm down, be patient.
That’s just the way things are now. My dad got a degree in geology, and he went to work for the Sinclair Oil Company. He stayed with that company until he was 55, left, took early retirement, went to another company for a couple of years, went back to his original company, and that was it: two workplaces in a 38-year career. I would have to count how many different places I’ve been at this point. I came here in 2001, and it’s the longest I’ve been anywhere by a factor of four.
What has made you stick around?
What first appealed to me so much was that the community health sciences faculty that I encountered really did care about their teaching a lot, and they did a lot of service work and they were doing good research. It was the kind of balance that I saw modeled at Dartmouth, and it was the thing I always wanted as an academic.
Now that maternal and child health is part of our department, there are even more people in the department who care just as much if not more about the students and providing good mentoring and having a well-worked-out curriculum that teaches skills and helps them find jobs.
You also mentor faculty. What does that involve?
A couple of years ago I offered this idea of my helping our assistant and associate professors build their cases for promotion. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, to do really good work. You also have to think like a public relations specialist. You have to demonstrate that you have a national reputation. And, to be promoted to full professor, you have to demonstrate that you have an international reputation. That requires a public relations strategy, and it also has an impact on what you choose to work on.
A couple of times a year I will offer to sit down and talk with them. One of the things that is advantageous is that having worked at consulting firms and having worked as an independent consultant, I’m used to thinking about funding opportunities other than NIH and CDC. That’s increasingly necessary with federal government funding plateauing out, and the competition for it increasingly fierce year-by-year.
What emerged out of that is that I’m on the faculty development committee, and [Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Advancement] Mike McClean and [Director of Faculty Development] Lisa Fredman changed the committee so that one person from each department plays the kind of role that I play in this department.
What led to you also chairing the Faculty Senate?
I told our department chair, Rich Saitz, a couple of years ago that I really wanted to do everything possible to leave the campsite a little cleaner than I found it. I’m not going to be here forever and I’m not sure exactly how much longer I’ll stay, but with Sandro [Galea, dean of SPH] and the reinvigoration of the School that he’s brought, I really do see an opportunity for the faculty to work with administration to bring about some positive change. Faculty development is part of that, but there are a lot of other things that we have to work on, too. So, for me, it’s the major way in which I am trying to provide service to the School, and—as long as the other Faculty Senate members can put up with me—I hope we’ll get a lot accomplished.
Why, as you say, leave the campsite cleaner than you found it?
At the risk of sounding totally cynical, much of the research that academics do is utterly forgettable. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but unless we do something with it, then what’s the point?
Because I have that somewhat jaded view of research, most of my work is practice-oriented. Mentoring students who’ll gone on, I hope, to do great things is part of that. Creating an environment here, contributing to creating an environment that allows people to do their very best work is all part of it.
Whatever research I’ve done will be forgotten in the mists of time. Only a few of us are truly remembered. I am not Albert Einstein. I am not Isaac Newton. I did not discover the double helix. I want to be remembered for training a lot of good people, putting a lot of good public health programming in place, and helping build a School that will thrive and where people will do great things.