Roads Taken

Entering college, Laura Bright was drawn to both French and math, two subjects she exceled in in high school. French remained something that came easily and she took for fun. But the math she took in college didn’t look like high school math and she wondered if that was the right path. As the department was combined with computer science, she took the advice of a female researcher and tried her ha...

In college, Nathan Paine exhibited an unbridled free spirit—playing Hacky sack, riding a motorcycle, and letting his long hair flow like his multi-colored graduation robes. His love of languages and cultures—inspired by living in France in high school and taking language study in Brazil in undergraduate days—took him to Japan to teach English for a year. That turned into nearly two decades in Japa...

Going into college, Heather Morein French thought that success meant pursuing either business, law, or medicine as those would provide the kind of stability her childhood hadn’t afforded her. She had an interest in science and though the classes she experienced were quite challenging, she knew the humanities courses with reading heavy curricula would be even more intimidating, given her dyslexia d...

With visions of a biology PhD dashed in a senior lab experiment gone way wrong, Andrew Obenshain envisioned a business career that would ultimately land him as CEO of a biotech firm. The industry being in its nascent days, there weren’t many avenues there, but he found his way into a biotech consulting firm and later a biotech venture capital firm. Realizing if he wanted to be a CEO he’d need to k...

When Jackie Kim Chappel left Hawaii for college in the east, she was leaving more than the island lifestyle behind. For her own mental wellbeing, she severed ties from her tiger mother and started exploring all the different ways she could be in the world. She was happy reading and writing and researching and started a career in marketing. The New York life wasn’t hitting all the marks and her eve...

New Hampshire native Jessica Drolet Wadlow felt college was home away from home being so close. She got involved in many things and was an economic major who went directly into the corporate world mostly out of interest but also because she had some loans to pay off. She landed in a management rotation program at JP Morgan and then went to business school. She switched careers into brand managemen...

After high school, guest Michael Anderson was wrestling whether he wanted to arrive at college as a Michael or Mike. It became a moot point after his Boy Scout qualities were immortalized a nickname given to him in orientation: Ranger. Known thusly ever since, Ranger soaked up the experiences of college and yet didn't leave with a clear path in mind. Early jobs in Boston were of the "work to live"...

Guest Amy McLean Sprole grew up in Kansas and knew two things when she was graduating high school: She wanted to go into medicine and she wanted to spread her wings outside the midwest. She immediatly dove into the pre-med track and was so focused that she was able to do all of those requirements and still make time for international study abroad opportunities, including an art history experience...

Welcome back to Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley. We are thrilled to be bringing you another great season of stories that remind us that you don’t have to know exactly where you’re going, you just need to be open to the adventure that awaits. As in all our previous seasons, in each episode we will talk to our guests—all a quarter-century-plus after college—about who they were as they gradua...

Hi, Roads Taken listeners. The show will returning for another season on Monday, April 17. We have spent our hiatus going to bed at a reasonable hour on Sunday nights and lining up a slew of great guests for you. So you have only a couple more weeks of waiting to hear their journeys. (Listen to find out how we went from season 3 to season 8!) Just make sure you have subscribed or you're following...

After another successful season, which hosted our 120th guest, Roads Taken will take another brief hiatus. During the break, revisit the rich archive of past episodes at RoadsTakenShow.com and also nominate yourself or another storyteller to be on the show. We will do some interviews this winter and come back in the spring with a new slew of stories for our next season. Find more episodes at ...

Guest Peter Jastreboff had considered a variety of paths to travel at college, from politics to medicine. When he actually started, his interests remained varied, diverging from those early thoughts and staying seemingly scattered. He ended up melding computer science and psychology into a major to better understand neural networks and minoring in religion. Put those pursuits together with his ext...

Going along with the flow was the natural way for Jack Kolodny. He tended to stick with what he knew--particularly those things where there were cut-and-dried, right-and-wrong answers but he also followed his interests and things that other nice people were interested in and cultivated an interesting life in college. Upon leaving, he didn't change course so much, hearing from a friend that managem...

Guest Ben Brainard  had cared for only a goldfish before getting to college but he somehow had the idea of becoming a veterinarian. He thinks it might have been on account of reading James Harriot’s tales of days spent bucolically going from farm to farm treating animals of all sizes. But even after doing the pre-med track and shadowing vets in Vermont he still didn’t have the full picture of what...

Guest Shilyh Warren  was comfortable in college having uncomfortable conversations about inequality and gender and felt herself to be a bit of a ramble-rouser. She wasn’t exactly sure what her path would be like but she wanted to emulate the activists who went out and made a difference in the world dismantling systems. Her first job after college was doing political organizing, where she realized...

Guest Chris McGee  loved science--even lab work--but it was really the story behind the science that captivated him. He thought that probably meant being in the biotechnology industry, but wasn't exactly sure how that would manifest in his life right after college. In an early attempt, he realized he was too far removed from the impact of the work. At the next company, he was getting closer to the...

Guest Christopher Kelly spent many a night during his college career in a film screening, honing a knowledge and love of cinema. But even more than his abiding love of film was his passion for writing about it and reflecting on culture more broadly. It wasn’t immediately obvious, however, how to make a life’s work of that. After a few placements at magazines and a freelance career that could keep...

Guest Blair Seidler Hammond navigated her freshman year of college knowing that her mother was sick with cancer. Her mother died at the end of that year and when Blair returned after the summer break, she was still trying to process and understand what the purpose of life was. Feeling the answer was to live into every moment, she prioritized daily joys such as painting and sailing. Realizing her f...

Guest Heather McNemar experienced a taste of world travel while in high school, when her father took a sabbatical and the family visited many spots, including Siberia for a slightly extended stay. Heather was drawn to the language and the culture and knew she would study both in college. Later, as she was making her way into the world, she didn’t know exactly how she would use her skills but knew...

Guest Kristen Calcagni Johnson pinned her early thoughts of being a doctor on her ability to stay calm when everyone else was stressing out. But even more core to her personality is her drive to experience many things, find joy in varied activities, and live into many facets of her identity and a balanced life. Since she was choosing colleges to today, she has always known that—while she takes her...

Guest Jenny Land Mackenzie  grew up in Vermont and figured she would likely return there one day. However, her college career—filled as it was with all sort of creative explorations and outdoor adventures—set her up to delve into one passion only to have it lead her to another passion. This began when her interest in the history of clothing led her to an internship at a museum led by a mentor who...

Guest Amel Ahmed ventured to college from an urban immigrant community and she spent much of her college career trying to figure out what was happening—academically, socially, culturally. She realized that she found comfort in embedding herself in the liminal spaces and really probing them, using the eye of an astute ethnographer and sleuthing historian. By the time she was ready to leave her unde...

Guest Luke Brown had a long-standing desire to become a professor. Though both English and physics seemed plausible at one point, he was pulled into the study of history through a classics course. His senior year of college, he thought he had it all figured out: he got engaged to his college girlfriend and he was applying to graduate school. He ended up getting married, but he also got rejected fr...

Guest John Peoples had never considered himself a science person, let alone one to follow the pre-med track. He had only a sense that he was independent and wanted to help people. After an off-term spent caring for his ailing grandfather and hearing his grandmother's stories about caregivers in their family, he began to reconsider a career in medicine. He returned to school and fleshed out his his...

Guest Patricia Herrera was on the premed path, happily thinking of herself as a STEM person. A chance encounter with Latinx theater in a freshman seminar led her to take to the stage and realized she loved it. She infused her science studies with healthy doses of theater opportunities but always thought of those pursuits as a hobby. After a term-long immersion experience with peers who were thinki...