Math, how boring! I was good at it, but didn't find it thrilling. That's how I felt in junior high school, when my career goals were to be a spy or an astronaut. (Already, I had several pamphlets from the FBI and had started the neighborhood Star Trek Spy Club.) My dad encouraged me to take a lot of math, reminding me that math is what got people to the moon.

In high school I studied geometry (I loved the logic), algebra, and trig-advanced algebra (I had no idea what those sines and cosines were for). Yike—before I knew it, I was a senior, and it was time to choose a college and a major. By now my goals had changed. I wanted to be a psychologist or a biologist. I didn't know what people in those professions really did, but my older sister Kathy had taken some psychology classes that sounded interesting, and my days in scouting and 4-H had taught me to love the outdoors.

College was fun. I could take classes in all sorts of fields. Some subjects that had been dull earlier turned out to be fascinating. For example, college-level geography involved flying around in airplanes, comparing ground sightings to aerial photographs and topographic maps—not memorizing state capitals. In a statistics course, the professor asked if I'd ever thought about becoming a math major.