“I try to recruit people who have experience with failing and know how to deal with it,” Johnsen said. “Because in biology, we fail so often. Plan A and plan B never work. If you’re super lucky, plan C will work, but usually we’re using plan D.”
“I might be one of the only Duke faculty who dropped out of college,” says Sönke Johnsen.
Johnsen didn’t just drop out of college. He also had a very unusual career trajectory. On his way to becoming a Biology professor at Duke, Johnsen was a kindergarten teacher, a carpenter, and a dance instructor.
He grew up thinking he would be a physicist like his father. But when he got to college, he realized it wasn’t the path he wanted for himself.
“For 15 years my life, I had this whole idea of who I was, what I was going to be, what I was planning to become. And all of a sudden I realized it wasn't going to be that. It was jarring.”
As an immigrant from Germany who grew up relatively poor, Johnsen had a hard time adjusting to undergraduate life at Swarthmore College. “It was a completely different world,” Johnsen said. “I had no idea of what I was doing and how to interact; I couldn't crack the social code of it at all. And intellectually, I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself.”
Johnsen left college after three years. He wanted nothing to do with academia and moved into a commune with his girlfriend. He only received his degree in math because he had overloaded one of the years and was able to finish later.
“I threw a match behind myself and said, ‘I’m never going to do anything academic again in my life.’”
After college, Johnsen worked odd jobs and taught dance classes to three-year-olds. It was there that he met a biology professor, who was the father of one of his students. On a whim, Johnsen applied for graduate school and — to his amazement — got in.
“I was so freaked out that I got in that, the day before I was supposed to show up, I just didn't come,” said Johnsen. “My advisor was very kind about it. And then a year later, the day before classes started, I decided I was going to do it, even though I had no idea what I was doing."
Johnsen had never taught undergraduates before and was terrified. Midway through the program, he nearly failed his oral exams. Officially, Johnsen passed them, but some of the faculty on the committee thought he shouldn’t be allowed to continue.
“My advisor had to plead for them to not kick me out,” Johnsen said. “He told them he would be responsible for me, and I pulled it together.”
Johnsen keeps these lessons from his past close when recruiting graduate students and running his lab.
“I try to recruit people who have experience with failing and know how to deal with it,” Johnsen said. “Because in biology, we fail so often. Plan A and plan B never work. If you’re super lucky, plan C will work, but usually we’re using plan D.”
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If you are a Trinity faculty member interested in participating in Freedom to Fail, please contact Elizabeth Richardson from Trinity Communications.
