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608 Importance of mentorsexperiments to assess creativity and such “soft” concepts — there was realscientific understanding among many psychologists, and so much yet to learnabout the mind! So armed with that view that there is much to do in thatdirection, in my final year, I actually applied to PhD programs in psychology,and was accepted at Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Harvard.Stanford was the strongest technically, with a very quiet but wonderfulprofessor who subsequently moved to Harvard, Bill Estes. Michigan had a verystrong mathematical psychology program, and when I visited there in springof 1965, I was hosted primarily by a very promising graduating PhD student,Amos Tversky, who subsequently wrote extremely influential and Nobel Prize(in economics) winning work with Danny Kahneman. Amos’ work, even in1965, was obviously great stuff, but I decided on Harvard, for the wrongreason (girlfriend on the East coast), but meeting Bill and Amos, and hearingthe directions of their work, confirmed the idea that being in psychology wasgoing to work out well — until I got to Harvard.50.3 Harvard University — the early yearsMy start at Harvard in the Department of Social Relations, which was thehome of psychology back then, was disappointing, to say the least. First,all sorts of verbal agreements, established on my visit only months beforewith a senior faculty member, were totally forgotten! I was told that my undergraduateeducation was scientifically deficient because it lacked “methodsand statistics” courses, and I would have to take them at Harvard or withdraw.Because of all the math and physics that I’d had at Princeton, I wasinsulted! And because I had independent funding from an NSF graduate fellowship,I found, what was essentially, a Computer Science (CS) program,which seemed happy to have me, probably because I knew Fortran, and hadused it extensively at Princeton; but I also found some real math courses andones in CS on “mathy” topics, such as computational complexity, more interestingthan the CS ones, although it was clear that computers, as they wereevolving, were going to change the way much of science was done.But what to do with my academic career? The military draft was still inplace, and neither Vietnam nor Canada seemed appealing. And I had pickedup a Master’s degree from CS in the spring of 1966.AsummerjobinPrincetonin1966leadtoaninterestingsuggestion.Iwasdoing some programming for John Tukey and some consulting for a PrincetonSociology Professor, Robert Althauser, basically writing programs to domatched sampling; Althauser seemed impressed by my ability to program andto do mathematics, and we discussed my future plans — he mentioned FredMosteller and the decade old Statistics Department at Harvard; he suggestedthat I look into it. I did, and by fall of 1968, I was trying my third PhD