Dan Rossi Interview

Interview with Dan Rossi (CAES, Class of 1971)
Date of Interview: January 27, 2004
Interviewer: Anthony Roselle

DR: I guess I have as many relationships to Cook College as most people would, more than most probably. I was a student at the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science. Following my undergraduate work, I worked for the college as a research associate. I then entered graduate school and did a master's degree here. I'm sorry, reverse that. I did the master's and then the research associate. Following the research associate, I went off for a PhD to Penn State . Completing the PhD, I came back as a faculty member. That makes me graduate alumnus, now faculty member. I left the faculty in 1985 and, in 1986, entered into administration. I have been in an admistrative position with the College since 1986. In addition to that I have two children that have attended Cook. One just graduated and one is a current student. So I'm a parent, I'm a former student, alumnus, faculty member, administrator, parent. Not too many ways I'm not linked to the college.

Q: At what point in all of this did Cook switch over from Ag?

DR: The switch was completed actually after I completed my undergraduate work. In 1973 it became Cook College . I finished in 1971. I was a graduate student at the time the conversion was occurring. At that point I was less in tune with what was going on. As a graduate student, I was focused on my graduate studies and less in tune with what was going on at the undergraduate level.

When I really came to appreciate what Cook College was during my Ph.D. program and I started looking for future employment, never expecting ever to come back to New Jersey . I thought when we left New Jersey that we would then be moving on. As I was working on my Ph.D. program, I was applying elsewhere and was interested in a number of other positions. During one summer the professional society I'm associated with had it's meeting at Penn State , and faculty from Cook College came there and interviewed me for possible positions. At that point, I started looking at what Cook really was and had to see what the differences were from when I was a student there at the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science to a point now that is Cook College. I have to say I was so amazed by what I saw. That was a major factor in my determining to come back to Rutgers . The change in what Cook was offering and what it was, its mission was significantly different now, I thought, and that was a real appealing factor to me. It's always nice to be able to go home if you have ties to a state, but professionally the other institutions that were interested at the time were actually better professionally in certain respects, especially if I wanted to do research in my area. I'm trained as an Agriculture Economist with a specialty in an area of natural resource economics, somewhat environmental economics. The types of schools I was looking at, Michigan State and Minnesota , they actually had much better programs in those areas. If I was weighing it purely on that factor, that would have been my decision. I had an opportunity, particularly, at Michigan State . That's where I had the greatest opportunity to go as an alternative. However, what Cook offered was really a unique experience.

It was the total undergraduate experience, now. When I was a student here, the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, it was the College of Agriculture . In a sense, it was a professional school. The students were not located here; ninety something percent of the students were not located on this campus, they were located on the Rutgers College campus. Again, when I was a student it was an all male school. It didn't become co-ed until 1972, until I completed my undergraduate program. So the experience here was interesting. You lived on the College Ave. campus and your course work was here, at least your specialized coursework. You also took courses on all the campuses. We went over to Busch; many of the sciences were there, basic sciences. We had many of our humanities and social sciences offered on the Rutgers College campus and then we had our ag courses, primarily ag courses, here. But now all of a sudden Cook was a four-year liberal arts college specializing in agriculture and natural resources.

And I liked the concept of being more than just a college of agriculture and natural resources. I liked the concept of being a liberal arts college because I wanted to look at the broad dimensions of the issues. I was particularly interested in natural resource environmental policy. I felt with the approach that was taken here by bringing together social sciences, humanities, and the sciences, you really could understand the problems and how to deal with the issues.

When I decided I wanted to have an impact on the environment as an undergraduate, at various majors, I finally decided that I needed to be a social scientist because I felt…let me take it back, back to “Silent Spring”. As an undergraduate, and even as a high school student, I read “Silent Spring” and the whole concept of the environment and ecology awakened me. I became very sensitive to what that was about. As undergraduates we were very much involved in looking at those issues. We were, but the entire country was, the country was trying to deal with this. It was 1970, the US government created EPA, the State of New Jersey created the Department of Environmental Protection, we passed the Clean Water Act, we passed the Clean Air Act. All of this happened as I was an undergraduate even in 1970; this all happened at that time. The country was awakening to an issue of social importance that was important to many of us. In looking at an interest in the environment, how could we manage the environment? When I looked at it, as much as I enjoyed sciences--and actually I performed very well in the sciences--I didn't feel they were going to give me the tools I needed to manage the environment because I don't believe you manage the environment, the environment manages itself. You manage people who impact on the environment. That's really where the problems occur, when you have humans interacting in many cases, so I felt that by entering into the social sciences I could look at how people make decisions relative to a lot of issues, but particularly how they make decisions relative to the environment and natural resources.

Now Cook then, I thought, provided a perfect environment for that, at the time. Having our own journalism department, having our social sciences here, that was very appealing. Most other colleges of agriculture where I probably would have ended up were more traditional colleges of agriculture much like what we would have been. Their students were not located on their campus, even if they were on the same broad geographic area they were involved best as they were at Penn State , all graduate students and all undergraduate students lived in the same areas. It didn't matter what school you were in, whether you were college of agriculture or social sciences or engineering, it didn't matter. We had here not only the disciplines, but we also had the students and I thought that the total learning experience of the student both in the classroom and outside the classroom could be brought together. That had a real attraction to me.

Q: You felt that having all the students of all the different majors being in close quarters would have a huge impact on their actual learning?

DR: On their total learning experience. I think learning occurs in and out of the classroom. I was so interested in that dimension that when I came here I applied for and was fortunate to receive an assignment as a resident counselor in the apartments because I wanted to be totally involved in that learning experience. For three years I was a resident counselor.

Q: During your graduate years?

DR: As a professor, as an assistant professor here, with my family. I had been married. In fact, my first child was born in…I started there in January, my first child was born in July. She was a true Cook student, though she didn't end up coming to Cook. I actually had a second child while we were here and when the second child came it was obvious that the apartment was getting kind of crowded. It was an interesting challenge. We were worrying about keeping the students up with the two children; they were both rather close, less than two years apart. Then I had the other side of it, the all night parties. So it was an interesting challenge. My first one became kind of the baby of the campus, and the students would use her for their photography classes, and bring her gifts, and baby-sit. And we became kind of the parents of our community in the Newells. The neighbors would come in. ‘Oh geez, my boyfriend's coming up and I don't have anything to cook, what'd ya have?” “Well, we have some chicken.” It just became an open house. And I enjoyed that because I felt that living here, not only did I have the opportunity to interact with students there and provide counsel to them, it also gave me the opportunity to be involved in other aspects of their lives, in other important stations and clubs and so on, so I was very active at the time. Then balancing that with my professional activities and my teaching, I was very much involved in teaching and advising. I guess a long answer to a very important question.

Q: You actually hit on several different questions, which was great. Those were great answers. What did you perceive as an undergraduate student as a lead up or a build up to the change? I know it happened after you graduated, but there had to be something going on.

DR: I was one of the early students involved in looking at the possible transition. That occurred in my senior year here. That would have been the fall of 1970 to spring of 1971. There's another side of me, though, that I have to explain in order to understand the context of that. When I said there were very few students who lived on this campus, as I said the vast majority of them lived on Rutgers College , I was one of those few that actually did live on this campus.

Q: Where did you live?

DR: I lived in Helyar House at that time. Prior to that--Helyar House opened in 1968, so when I came here in 1967 it had not been built yet--I actually lived in a place called the Towers, which was associated with JB Smith Hall. Most students won't know JB Smith Hall but it was the location of the Entomology Department. The section of the building I lived in was actually the location of the environmental science department. We lived on the second floor of an old building; that was where a blueing factory had been. We lived essentially in a skylight of that building. They put a floor in there and we had nothing but windows around us painted blue. Interestingly enough, that gave us privacy. I lived there for one year and Helyar House opened up, then we moved over there. The then dean offered that living experience, of cooperative living, to me when I applied here. The reason why I came to Rutgers was it had an excellent reputation, but it wasn't my first choice. The total financial package was put together for me that included cooperative living that moved my first choice up to come to Rutgers . I didn't know much about Rutgers when I applied for it. Rutgers was not viewed necessarily as the most desirable institution at the time. It had the reputation of being good, but not student friendly. We heard rumors about the number of students who could not succeed here. It was pretty tough and there were stories that you would enter a class and the professor would say look to the left and look to the right and one of you won't be here by the end of the semester and two of you won't be here by the end of the year. In certain majors that was probably…

DR: In the context of what was happening we had, we were in the middle of Vietnam and we were coming to a point in realization. I was coming to a realization, that perhaps this was not a just war. That was hard for me to understand. I had come out of a context that my father and my uncles all served in World War II, I grew up with John Wayne, the good guys vs. the bad guys, and the US was always the good guy. And now we had come to the realization that this war was something different than the wars we had previously been involved with. I had friends going over; some were not returning, some returned very different than they were when they had gone over there. We had instituted, the year prior to my graduation, the draft lottery and all names went in, actually the birthdays went in. I never won any major lottery in my life, except that lottery. I was selected number one; my date was the first date selected. It was clear I was going to graduate, receive a diploma, and most likely receive a rifle in the other hand. I thought I would have been drafted. I was in good health and I assumed that was what was going to happen.

That happened the year prior to my graduation. So going into my senior year, one of the things that was dominating in my mind was what was I going to do about that. I believe there were two or three number 1's in Rutgers , one student reportedly left that year to go to Canada ; he had been a senior, and I don't know what had happened to the other student, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. Canada was not a choice for me, not with my family and everything I believed in. It wouldn't have been feasible for me. At the same time, I wasn't confident that I wanted to go over there. I was afraid. And again, it was coming to realization that didn't seem like a war we were going to win. The campus was very active; Rutgers was a very active campus during this time. Some people referred to it as the Berkeley of the East. The ROTC Building porch was burned at one point. Students took over an administration building. They went in there and the then governor of the state decided he was going to remove the students and decided to bring in the National Guard to do that. The then president of the University, Mason Gross, who was an unbelievable president, a very old school president, told the governor, “You're my guest and you are not to remove them,” and he came in and removed them. By going in and talking to them and explaining to them that they had to, he averted what could have been a disaster, another Kent State , ‘cause I think the atmosphere was charged enough. It was so charged here even this campus and at that time the College of Agriculture was a relatively conservative campus; the faculty were conservative people; agriculturalists tend to be conservative people. Various faculties voted to determine whether--things had gotten so heated here on campus--to determine whether they would complete a semester.

It came up to a point when it was the week prior to final exams and the faculty voted they would not hold final exams because the students were so involved in various activities. And I have to admit to you that I can't remember whether that was the Fall of my senior year or the previous Spring, I'm just losing track of the two, I know it was one or the other. I don't remember exactly…it wasn't ‘69; it had to be either spring of ‘70 or fall of ‘70 because of the courses I had. I can remember one of the courses I had. So our faculty, I can remember being a student, our students met at the time, we had a large auditorium called Collins Auditorium in Blake Hall, and they met there and came out saying they voted that we would not have finals. We were very surprised. We thought the rest of the University would do it, but we would discontinue.

So, in that atmosphere you had so may other things going on. At that time this had been shortly after Robert Kennedy was killed, Martin Luther King was killed, we had riots in our state, civil rights riots in our state. In my own home community we had riots, we had that going on. We had this ecology/environmental movement showing we were destroying the earth, we had Vietnam War, we had a drug culture being developed. I didn't know what drugs were when I was in high school. I came up here and all of a sudden I had friends who were taking drugs. Again, I came from a very conservative background. I wouldn't even take a No-Doze because I was afraid of what it might do to me. Even though I would stay up late taking exams, I would never do anything.

But all of these things were happening in my life and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to manage all these important things. I was worrying about what I was going to do. I had been dating the same girl for three years and I was considering getting engaged. And as we entered into December of my senior year two things occurred. On December 23 I was notified by an army reserve unit that they were going to accept me into the army reserve, meaning that I would have to go to full-time status, and that was one of the high points of my life, believe it or not, because it gave me the compromise it did. I could maintain the support of my father. I'm not sure what my father would have done. I think it would have been hard for him to deal with me if I decided I was going to resist doing something. But it also kept me out of the situation that I didn't think, at that point, was just and appropriate. And then on midnight of December 24 th I got engaged. And I was thinking about what I was going to do, where was I going to go to grad school, was I going to work.

So all of these things were also in my mind as I was trying to think of this new school. I wasn't totally focused on that. Following coming back for the second semester, at that point then, I was being told by [the] reserve unit it was likely they were going to send me off for basic training, but they didn't know when. I was contacted in February and told I was going to be sent at the end of March or the beginning of April for basic training. So now I was saying, “What do I do now, this is my senior year, my senior semester, what things am I focusing on?” I didn't want to say no because if I said no then I may be giving the whole thing up. I came and I talked to the deans and we found that the University has a bit of a nice clause that indicates that if you are drafted to active service, this came out of World War II, that if you complete at least half your semester, you had the option of taking the grades that you'd earned up to that point. It so happened I was leaving the week after the middle of the semester and I did leave, I left in April.

I had been involved with meeting with the [planning] committee on a periodic basis. At that point I stepped off and a good friend of mine replaced me on the committee. You'll probably be interviewing him at some point. He's Bill Campbell. He actually ended up replacing me on the committee; he was a year behind me. At the end of Vietnam , he had come out of Vietnam . He was in the Marine Corp; he'd come back to school. He started school, left to go into the army, came back and he was a year behind me though he was several years older than I was. So I really never got further involved other than we were doing this early conceptualization of this idea, how do we govern a student body here? We start thinking about what it would be like having dormitories and apartments, but the real intense planning occurred the following year, the ‘71-‘72 year, for the opening, and then ‘72-‘73 so you get two more years. We were much more preliminary; we just wanted to start getting student input into some of the issues that would be important, that we're going to be talking about, having apartments here, living conditions here. I guess my experience of living on campus helped a little bit, maybe that was one of the reasons why I was involved.

Q: Was this committee the one that Bruce Hamilton was chairing?

DR: No, I don't believe so. This was primarily a student committee. The deans had appointed…I can't tell you exactly how we were selected but we were brought together, I don't remember who, I'm sure we met with somebody.

Q: Was Bob Glennon involved in that? Or again, was that later, he was part of a later group?

DR: I know some people were, my roommate was involved and we had some other people from Helyar House involved in the group. And again, it was primarily students being brought…. I can't remember who… if there was a dean or faculty involved in working with us. I know there had to be, I just can't recall… it may have been Tom Concannon or Roger Locandro. They were both involved in student programming and I just don't remember which one would have been involved.

Q: With every great idea, with most great ideas, there are still people who say, “Well it shouldn't happen.” What was the sentiment of the people who said it should not change to Cook, if at all?

DR: I'm not sure if I heard much negative at the time. And maybe if that occurred, I don't know if the students really…at the time we were moved in it was so preliminary I don't think I had heard whether it occurred later on in ‘72 going into ‘72 among students. I don't know how the faculty was reacting to it either. We weren't getting much feedback necessarily, the students weren't, but change would create that. I'm sure…I believe that while as liberal as universities are, in many ways we're conservative and we don't react well to change. I think students probably react even less so than faculty do, from my experience. You would think that would be the case but students don't like change. I'm convinced of that over the years.

Q: Switch pages, more fun topics. I don't know this personally but when did Ag Field day start? I believe it was before your time.

DR: There were field days, checked the history, and references to field days go back all the way to early 1900's. So you want to check; there is a book that describes the early years of the experiment station. That brings you up to 1930. That brings you from 1880 to 1930. The Waller book--we can make sure you look at that--you'll see references to field days. There were field days when I was here. In fact, my recollections were that we in Helyar House, one of the jobs we had obtained… was to …they used to put up a very large tent by Blake Hall and that tent was used… the Dean would go out and welcome the people on campus and it was used for a lot of things as part of Field Day. It would be set up a day or two days before and I remember spending at least one of my years, I think we did it two years in a row, all night there watching the tent so nobody would walk off with it or do whatever they'd do with it. It was like a big circus tent. So we camped out there, the men of Helyar House. We had a lot of fun, a lot of fun. A lot of fun, I have to say that, staying there all night.

There was also, and I don't know when it started I can't recall…I know it was in place when I first came back…I'm pretty sure it was and I think it may have been in place when I was a student, something called Science Days. This was the Friday before Ag Field Day and high schools were brought onto campus, this being a form of recruitment, and it was associated with Ag Field Day. So we were bringing them up and there would be buses of them coming on to campus. I'm pretty sure that occurred when I was first on the faculty. I know there were Science Days, an excellent opportunity to bring students onto campus. So it's something I think some of us would like to bring back again, the idea of Science Days. I think we have a lot to be proud of our campus, we still do. Even though it's different now than it was when I first came back to Cook.

Q: I want to ask you more about Ag Field Day. Now we have one Ag Field Day and you're saying there were field days.

DR: It was referred to as Field Days. When I was here you would have had Science Day which was on Friday and then you had…Saturday was the…I don't know if there was more than now, prior to that there may have been. There may have been several days.

Q: Can you give us, without divulging too much information, something you might have observed at an Ag Field Day that you though just signified Ag Field Day, maybe the tent with steam coming out, maybe something more extreme like a bonfire that there always was?

DR: That I recall. I'm trying to remember the specific activities. The various departments on campus were very much involved. But I don't remember it being…when I came back on the faculty Ag Field Days had evolved quite a bit. I think it became much more student intensive and that's probably because now we have students living here. Before, we were drawing the students in. I don't recall anything all that special. But as I said, when I came back, though now by then this was 1978, I came back on the faculty. By then, Ag Field Days were very, very intense.

Q: What was it like then?

DR: There was a whole breadth of things going on now. We had the Ag- Economics Club I had worked with for a while. Started the 5 kilometer run and we had pig tosses and Alpha Zeta was doing their chicken barbeques and we had a beer truck that was a very big part of Ag Field Day. Consumption of alcohol had intensified during my first years back here. We had not only a beer truck at Ag Field Day, we also had a pub on campus. The pub was actually located in the Douglass Student Center , down where the cafeteria is, the eating area. And I was the advisor to the Cook/Douglass pub.

Q: There was a pub used on an all girls' campus?

DR: Used by males and females.

Q: Was that the social atmosphere?

DR: It was a completely mixed social atmosphere. We also attracted students from other campuses. When I first came back the drinking age was 18, the pub was very, very successful in terms of admiration of people. In terms of managing, it became a real difficulty because it was a student-operated pub. And managing the student operated pub, trying to maintain a license and trying to maintain property, and trying to keep the building in one piece. We had to deal with the director of the Douglass Student Center , who was a very tough lady, and she had a lot of difficulties with the students tearing the place up. Having a pub on campus was very desirable in many ways. Not that I would encourage consumption of alcohol, but I think it provided an opportunity for student to start learning responsibility and doing it in a relative low cost because they wouldn't have to drive there; they could walk home. We tried to teach as much as you can, in that atmosphere, teach some responsibility about drinking. When the drinking age went up to 21 several years later the pub couldn't be successful; it just didn't have enough people. Because now only the seniors could drink in there, by and large, a few juniors perhaps, but mostly seniors, so we had to close the pub.

That got me off topic, but it was an interesting part of campus, a very interesting part of campus, because it was a different dimension to this campus. That and Ag Field Day which had really heavy consumption, and the apartments used to have very large parties at that time, they were still allowed to have parties. One of the last parties that really turned the tide in consumption on campus was a 21-keg party that a bunch of seniors put together at the time of graduation. It became clear, 21 seniors each bought a keg and it was such a disaster that, changes in society, changes in the law, changes in responsibility. The University started clamping down and we have a very different atmosphere on campus now relative to the consumption of alcohol. Prior to that it was more like what you would see in movies like Animal House and places like that, where the consumption of alcohol…even when I was a student you had to be 21…it wasn't looked at, the fraternities had alcohol all the time. It didn't seem to be an issue at that time. It became an issue in ‘80, that's when it really became an issue of how do you handle it considering it in society.

Q: You mentioned third party liability?

DR: That was a major factor. Universities were being sued big time, millions of dollars, and we had some bad instances at Rutgers . One student, after heavy consumption, stepped off the bleachers at the football stadium, at the top. It was not a good situation. So bad things had happened. Returnees had some bad experiences, evolving away from that being the center of social activities and then also trying to deal with drugs now that's also on campus. How do you deal with that? There's always a lot less acceptance of that. Many things were changing-- some for the better, some for the worse.

Q: You say when one you were an undergrad, another when you had returned, and now at present. You said already when you returned the thing you valued most about Cook was that the students worked together and it was a liberal arts school with all the different majors and they communicated with each other and interacted and you got a better idea of the environment, that's when you came back. What do you think is now the most valuable piece of Cook College now is still the same and then also the most valuable piece of the Agricultural and Natural Resource College ? ‘Cause you had some affection towards this issue.

DR: Well, let me start at the beginning. My coming to the College of Agriculture, in addition to looking at the financial things, was almost by mistake by the way; I wasn't looking to major in agriculture. I wanted to do…I really liked biology and wanted do research. We had a major called Preparation for Research, biological research. I checked that and that put me into the Ag School. I didn't know the Ag School. I applied to Rutgers because Rutgers was Rutgers . When I checked that, I ended up coming to the Ag School. When I got here, though, living on the farm with a number of students from the Ag School, I became much more involved. For my work assignments…I got involved in working here on the campus and involved in some of the agricultural aspects. I really enjoyed working with faculty.

The relationship we had here, we had very small student-to-faculty ratios on this campus. We didn't have a lot of students when I was a student here. I'm not sure what we're up to; I don't know if we're up to fifteen hundred students yet or not, something like that. We had relatively small classes, we were getting good science, but at the same time it was science dealing with problems and I always wanted to deal with problems. It wasn't just science or science ed that I got in some of my other course work. These were faculty that I thought were dealing with issues of importance. Whether it was on the environmental and natural resource side or agricultural issues and I was getting a good appreciation of agricultural issues at the time between my coursework and living here. Then I went on and got my three degrees all in agricultural economics, looking at agricultural policy and looking at different problems, which I'm really learning a lot about agriculture in the process. When I came back, as I told you, we were broader than that, so I really like that.

Today I think the change, the reorganization that happened in 1980, some would argue it might be better but I don't think it's better. I think the original Cook was better than it is. Some people, I'm sure, would debate on that issue; people would argue both ways. I thought it was really valuable being able to do that. And again, bringing all the dimensions in, there's still a thrust here with agriculture and natural resources, so even if you were these other majors, that was still the whole concept of how our college was. I think that having them all here interacting, the synergy that was created amongst the faculty and student, amongst faculty and faculty and students and students and faculty and students, was really positive. We're missing some of that now.

I still think that Cook is a really desirable place to be. I like the fact that we still have a student life program associated here. Unlike still most other colleges of agriculture, you won't see that elsewhere. We are a small school with all the advantages of small numbers and knowing your faculty, knowing each other and not just being a number like many of the other schools that I've been associated with or I've visited. We have all the advantages of a major university, which is terrific. We have all the resources of any major university, sports and libraries and all the other services to come along with that. Still you have a very nice small campus, and it's manageable and it's people-manageable and it's people-friendly. Rutgers , as a whole, is not a people-friendly place, as most institutions are not. Larger institutions have trouble dealing with that and it's not just Rutgers . I've been to other campuses and they have the same problem whereas Cook is a much more manageable size and is people-friendly. That's why I'm here and that's why I want to be here.

We still do some very, very good things and we can do. Things have changed; times have changed. Demands on faculty have changed. I wish faculty could be more involved with students than they have been more recently. As I've explained to you, I was very much involved but times have changed. The pressures on faculty for promotion and advancement are different. Advising was literally done by faculty in the past, and now students don't get much advising at all because they can do all the registration on their computer or on the telephone, we don't need to sign off. When I was professor here and advisor, I had sixty undergraduates assigned to me. They had to come to me to sign off on the courses they were taking. They could not register unless they had my signature. I sat down with every one of the students each semester and pulled out the file. “Where are you, where are you going, what do you want to do, do you still want to do what you're talking about, are you taking the right courses.” That doesn't happen. It's up to the students to do that now. The faculty is very busy and it's in the hands of much fewer people because the demands on faculty are very different than they were back then. I think we're missing…the students are missing out on the one-to-one mentoring.

What made the difference in my life here were faculty. I benefited from cooperative living and the opportunity to be a leader and so forth, but the faculty really made a difference. There was a group of faculty that really made a difference, one probably above the others. When I think of the group of faculty, I think that maybe one above the others I would add Bob Koch who became chair of this department. He was the person who told me I was going to become an economist, because I didn't know that. Dean Merritt, at the time I had a good personal relationship with him because of Helyar House. Roger Locandro and Bruce Hamilton. They both had important parts in shaping me, in molding me as a person. As a professional, Bruce Hamilton. He happened to be the first resident counselor at Helyar House. The one person who truly became a mentor, and I often called him my second father, was Bob Koch. He recognized in me when I took some courses in economics, at the time I was struggling. I started out in the area of plant biology in research. Somehow, I was very confused as an undergraduate. I moved into Food Science, and I don't know how I ended up over there, Dr. Stier, a tremendous individual. And I was taking my courses in sciences and I took a couple of economics courses, I loved the sciences; I performed very well in them. I took some course here, Koch saw me, he brought me in one day after class and said, “You're going to be an economist.” I said, “No, I'm in Food Science.” At that time I was looking at nutrition. Again, it was the people side of things. He said, “You're going to switch and become an economist.” So I went back to talk about it, and went to Dr. Stier my other advisor, and he said, “You're crazy, you're one of our best students. You do well in all the courses you need, organic chemistry and all these courses, your nutritional biochemistry. What are you thinking about?” I'm really interested in how people make decisions, and I'm really thinking more and more about environment and natural resources.