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There was a moment in time where I was really focused on the Navy and I followed through with it - I passed the test. I was happy with myself because I was accomplishing something and I was really working towards a goal. That was the first true thing I invested my energy in.

I wanted to be involved in music and I felt I needed to get in quick. I didn't want to spend four years in college and then hope for the best. I gave myself a year, which is why I kept pushing people for a chance. I literally felt my whole life was in the balance. Music was my life, and I was scared of having time pass by and missing my chance.

I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do in school, but I definitely didn't have adequate time to reach my full potential as a student.

At the time I finished high school, I was determined to study biology, deeply convinced to eventually be a researcher.

College and the responsibilities that came with it helped me transition from teenager to adulthood.

I look back upon graduate school as being a very happy period in my life. The chance to be thoroughly immersed in physics and to be surrounded by friends pursuing similar goals was a marvelous experience.

I wanted to race cars. I didn't like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.

I willed myself through a junior college to a university and, ultimately, a Ph.D.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.