When Daniel Goodman PhD ’89 first conceived of the book that became Find Your Path: Unconventional Lessons from 36 Leading Scientists and Engineers (MIT Press, December 2019), his intent was to provide career guidance to students. But as the project progressed, Goodman writes in his introduction to the volume, “I realized that through their first-person stories our role-model scientists and engineers are actually providing valuable life guidance for readers at any stage in their career.”

Find Your Path includes Goodman’s own story, recounting how he went from studying plasma physics at MIT to his current role as director of advanced technology at ASM-NEXX in Massachusetts (as well as a director of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, which provides graduate fellowships in applied science, and helped inspire the book project). The collection also contains chapters based on Goodman’s interviews with six other MIT alumni [including Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, Nobel laureate and MIT physics professor emeritus].

As Goodman writes, “Although their challenges vary from subject to subject, one commonality is the love these role models have for scientific discovery and their desire to use science and technology to understand and improve the world.”

This is a section of an article originally posted by MIT Alumni Association on Slice of MIT. Find Your Path: Unconventional Lessons from 36 Leading Scientists and Engineers (editor, Daniel Goodman), published by MIT Press in 2019. Copyright: MIT Press. All rights reserved.

This article also appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Science@MIT