I had no idea the Strong Interest Inventory was invented on the Farm until I read our article on the 100th anniversary of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nor did I know it was named after the man who developed it, GSB professor Edward Strong Jr.
The SII was my favorite assessment in a career planning course I took in 1998, when I was casting about to transform myself into anything but an attorney. I was—and am—grateful that there are people who enjoy practicing law, but I was not one of them.
No matter what my SII results may have revealed, I spent most of the course trying to disabuse my classmates of the notion that I just needed to tweak my legal career—maybe join an NGO or go in-house. Then the instructor looked at me and said, “I’m going to try something on you, and I want you to just react.” I nodded, and she unveiled her hypothesis: “ ‘I want to work at Stanford even if I have to mop the floors.’ ”
Discoveries happen here, and my colleagues and I get to tell you about them.
And I said, “That’s right.”
Three months later, I became the editorial assistant at Stanford. I’ve worked at the magazine for 21 of the past 26 years, taking a five-year break to hold three other jobs at the university.
The Strong Interest Inventory is just one of hundreds of useful Stanford-generated research insights I’ve gotten to learn about by working here. Over the years, stories in this magazine have changed or deepened my thinking about forgiveness. The placebo effect. Free will. Longevity. Virtual reality. Permafrost. Income inequality. Beauty. Autonomous driving. Archimedes. Rural nutrition. Concussions. Authoritative parenting. Cancer treatment. Ants.
Discoveries happen here, and my colleagues and I get to tell you about them. In this issue alone, you can read about a “pacemaker for the brain” that adapts to control Parkinson’s symptoms, the potential of wastewater to produce drinking water, nutrients, materials, energy, and information, and the sex-linked genetics of orange cats. No matter your intellectual interest, odds are that Stanford scholars are shedding light on it.
The Strong Interest Inventory, by the way, said I should become a nursing home administrator. In hindsight, that does seem like something I would have enjoyed. Curiously, “magazine editor” was not on the list. But then again, neither was “lawyer.”
Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96, is the editor of Stanford. Email her at kathyz@stanford.edu.
