Chapter 01: Tracking Toward a Career in Therapy Approaches

Chapter 01: Tracking Toward a Career in Therapy Approaches

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. Schover sketches her family background and educational pathway up to her graduate education. She talks about her areas of skill, her early interest in archeology, and how her adolescent experience of being in therapy stimulated her interest in that field. She talks about influences from her father and mother, who taught her the value of being self-directed.

Next, she talks about selecting her college and sketches the honor’s thesis topic she worked on at Brown University (BA in psychology, 1974): selective attention in autistic children.

Identifier

SchoverL_01_20180918_C01

Publication Date

9-18-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Personal Background; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences

Transcript

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Here we go, let me just, I’ll put on the identifier. Today is September 18, 2018. This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski and I’m in the Historical Resources Center in Pickens Tower, on the main campus of MD Anderson Cancer Center. I’m sitting with Dr. Leslie Schover, who has come in for our first session today. This interview is being conducted for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project, run by the Historical Resources Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Schover came to MD Anderson in 1982, as an assistant professor of psychology, in the Department of Urology. We had corrected this, that you spent time away from MD Anderson, at the Cleveland Clinic, where you served as staff psychologist from 1986 to 1989 [sic 1999].

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Ninety-nine.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Nineteen ninety-nine, I’m sorry.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

That’s okay.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And then returned to MD Anderson, in the Department of Behavioral Science. You retired in 2016, to focus on your startup company, Will2Love.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Right.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So I’m very sorry, we are moving. We’ve got our thing and our time left is going down, so we should be okay. I’ll keep an eye on our time and then we’ll make sure that we have another check and make sure we’re doing well.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

All right, so a little reprise, [laughs] my apologies for that.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

That’s okay, it’s not your fault.  

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Well, it probably is actually, but thank you for saying that. So for the record again, tell me where you were born and when.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

I was born in 1952, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Jewish family. When I was about three and a half, we moved out of the city, into Highland Park, which is one of the more affluent suburbs on the North Shore. We were kind of at the bottom end of the financial spectrum, because neither of my parents finished college. My mother had about three years at the University of Chicago and dropped out to get married and got pregnant right away with my older sister. My dad had about six months of technical school, and they ended up, during World War II, going to Oak Ridge, where my father worked as an electronic technician in the group that was supposed to get the first gram of plutonium for the atomic bomb. Both my parents knew exactly what was going on, they knew the whole story, unlike some people in Oak Ridge, so it was a big adventure for them.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Now why is it that your parents knew what was going on?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

That’s a story in itself. My father was working—he had a friend who eventually, after the war, became a physicist, but at the time, they were both in their early twenties, and his friend came to him and said, “You’re really great at electronics and I’m working on a top secret project and we need somebody like you.” And my dad said, “But I’m already working on a big project for the war” --which was building speakers for battleships, so you’d be able to hear commands above the din of battle. His friend said, “Well, come and meet my boss.” So they met a scientist at the University of Chicago, whose name was Charles Coryell, who was the head of this group that later went to Oak Ridge, and he invited both my parents to dinner and basically told them everything, the whole thing about the atomic bomb. When they went home my mother said, “Well, are you going to transfer to that project?” My dad said, “I don’t think we have a choice.”

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

They’ll have to kill you, right? [both laugh]

Leslie Schover, PhD:

So you know, I think my sister was an infant then and when she was a toddler, they left her with my mother’s parents for about a year and a half, I think, until they got a house in Oak Ridge and could bring her down with them. After the war, they went back to Chicago, where my dad worked as an engineer and my mother taught piano but didn’t really have a full-time job until I was nine or ten.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And remind me of your parents’ names.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

My father’s name was Donald Schover and my mother was Janet Moss Schover, and I had an older sister, ten years older than I am, whose first name was Michal, spelled M-i-c-h-a-l.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So tell me about the whole school thing, which sounds like it was…

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah. I was pretty unhappy in school. I always felt like I was really bored with what we were doing, and I was reading books under the table and getting into trouble for answering questions when I wasn’t called on. I was kind of a fat little kid and I wasn’t good at sports, so I was bullied a lot, even in this very affluent school system where I grew up. So I didn’t really enjoy school until basically junior high, we had a little bit of enrichment for the brighter kids, but until high school, when I went to one of the best public high schools in the U.S. It was rigidly leveled, so there were about 550 kids in my class, but you were in the same classes with the same 50 kids basically, all the way through.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What was the name of the school?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

It was Highland Park High School.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay. Now you were kind of alluding to the fact that it was supposed to be a really good school but you were bored. Was it not really as good as it was cracked up to be or what was the situation?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, it was just in grammar school, I mean they basically taught to the common denominator, and I, especially in reading, was so far ahead of what they were doing, I was just bored and restless all the time. I was okay at math, I wasn’t wonderful, but you know, even that went way slower than I probably could have.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

But you were excelling for sure, in the verbal areas.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. And what were you thinking about at the time, when you were a kid, kind of imagining what you might do?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well from seven to thirteen, I definitely wanted to be an archeologist, and I read all the books on ancient Egypt in the children’s library, and the children’s librarian liked me, so when I was about nine or ten, she said, “You’ve got to go into the adult library now.” And you know, I remember my mother guiding me to read young adult novels that she’d enjoyed as a kid and things like that, so I read a tremendous amount as a child. By the time I got into high school, then it was much more challenging, because we were in AP classes. I had four years of AP French and there was AP English, and I didn’t do as well in math my first year in high school. I was in AP math and I was just kind of slow on the tests and I got a “C” grade for a six-week grade, and my father hit the ceiling and asked why I hadn’t come to him to have him explain if I didn’t understand, and he wouldn’t believe me that I understood and it was just like, you know, the speed of the test. So, it was kind of comical, because my parents had sat me down at the beginning of high school and said, “Now we don’t expect you to get straight As, and as long as you get Bs, you’re fine.” They made such a big deal out of this, so I moved down to above average math instead of AP math and then everything was fine.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

A more comfortable fit.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Right.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So tell me about discovering the psychology piece, because it sounds like that happened fairly early.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah. I kind of switched from archeology to anthropology in high school and I didn’t get into a summer program at the Field Museum in Chicago, that I really wanted to go to, because my mother came with me to the interview and quizzed them unmercifully about how would I be safe on taking the train from Highland Park to the South Side. I’m sure they didn’t want to deal with her, so they didn’t accept me, and I was so mad. Around that time, or the next year, I had some psychotherapy, because my family had a lot of conflict and tension, and I was kind of depressed and unhappy, and I decided that really, what I’d like to do is be a psychologist.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Now I wanted to ask you, because at that time, a lot of families, you know, I mean I’m thinking often people too, in the harder sciences, they don’t think about seeking help. So, was this seeking psychotherapy your idea, was it the family’s idea, and was there an acceptance of these sorts of interventions in your family?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well you know, it’s a Jewish family, so they have a little bit more openness to it. Also, I think it was probably our pediatrician who suggested it, as I recall. And you know my mother actually ended up self-learning to be an accountant, she never got her CPA but she was the first female controller of an industrial company in Illinois. So both my parents were very self-taught, so they were open to a lot of things, you know they were very liberal politically. They weren’t early hippies or anything like that, but they weren’t as closed off. My father was not a typical engineer, you know he had a lot of more humanistic interests.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So, do you feel like their attitudes in those areas had an influence on you?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, I’m sure they did. I also have always been very somewhat progressive, or to the left politically, and you know, concerned about minorities, relations with different ethnicities, and all those different kinds of things, and I suppose that was certainly something that was modeled at home.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What about the self-taught piece?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well that also, I just really respected both of them for not just waiting for a formal education to learn things, but sitting down and learning things on their own. I’ve always thought that was a great model, and I think especially, you know, in our world today, you have to be self-taught because if you stand still, you’re going to be outmoded very quickly.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So tell me about focusing on psychology and selecting your college. What was that all about?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, my mother said that if they were going to pay all that tuition, she was not going to send me to California. I wanted to apply to Stanford [University] or Pomona [College] and those were out, so I looked mostly at Ivy League schools, and my mother desperately wanted me to go to Radcliffe and she wanted me to wear white gloves to the interview in 1968, which I successfully talked her out of. [laughs] I applied, early decision, to Brown [University] because they had their new curriculum they’d just introduced, where you could take all your classes pass/fail, and you could make up your own major. And even though in the end, I didn’t take advantage of some of that freedom, it sounded very nice to me after this high school where everybody knew everybody’s SAT scores and I was tenth in my class and thought that was a failure, things like that. I did not want to cater to my ambitions. I thought they were probably maladaptive. So, I got a good education at Brown and I took mostly psychology and creative writing and French literature courses, all the minor other things that I needed to for my major or that interested me. In retrospect, I still remember a lot of those things and I think people who have to take all the different courses in college that they don’t really even feel that interested in, probably just forget a lot of it. So I still think that was a good system of education for me.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Tell me about your honors thesis.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

I was going to graduate after three years and I didn’t get into any but my bottom choice of grad schools that I’d applied to. And rather than go there, I decided to stay and do an honors thesis, which was on selective attention in autistic children. After that, I got into most of my top choices and I went to UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] for graduate school, which was, and still is, ranked, I think as the top clinical psychology program in the U.S., and had a lot of diversity and lots of things that you could do there. I think it was a very good program for me, even though I didn’t have one specific mentor, which wouldn’t fly now, but in my days, that was possible.

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Chapter 01: Tracking Toward a Career in Therapy Approaches

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