The Shifting Sands of a Professional Identity

I decided while an undergraduate that I wanted to be a psychologist. Beyond that, I’m still not sure what I’ll do when I grow up. This brief autobiography maps the shifting sands of my professional identity: from psychotherapist to developmental psychopathologist and then to primary concerns with education and training, from psychologist to academic administrator and then back again, to forensic psychologist and on to whatever may come next. Through all of these shifts in focus, however, there has been one recurring theme—the appeal of being an assessment psychologist. The events that kept bringing me back to assessment, whatever else my focus at the time, are recorded in the story that follows.