Jeffrey Alderman – 50th Reunion Essay

Jeffrey Alderman

2384 SW Madison St

Portland, OR 97205

jeffrey_a_alderman@yahoo.com

971-470-1396

Spouse(s): Shizuko Ushiyama (1997 -)

Education: Post-Yale: University of Bridgeport, MS (1975); University of NC, PhD (1982)

Career: Assistant professor Mt Sinai Med School, NYC; Novartis, clinical research 5 years; Pfizer, clinical research 20 years

Avocations: music, languages, winter sports

College: Davenport

It’s not what I expected but no complaints.

I recall well the day I received my Yale diploma. I was glad to get out but damned if I knew what I was going to do next. And although I tried to put a good face on it for my parents and friends, it terrified me. How would I have a successful life if I didn’t know what I wanted to succeed in, let alone how to go about it? Suppose I screwed up my life by making just one wrong but critical choice? So I stumbled out the Yale door and bumbled forward, anticipating the worst.

I consulted my inclinations and found just one thing I was sure of, namely, that I had an interest in scientific matters in general and health sciences in particular. So I went to work at Milford Hospital as a med tech, while taking night courses in biology at the nearby University of Bridgeport. After getting an MS at U of B, I felt I should move forward somehow. I had really liked the laboratory work in Milford but it seemed to have a limited horizon. So I looked around at related sciences and thought the chemistry of life (biochemistry) would have inexhaustible fascination for me. After completing PhDs in biochemistry and clinical chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill, I got post-doc training and paid off some student loans through work as an assistant professor at Mt Sinai in NYC. But that experience also taught me that academic backbiting and grant writing held little appeal. So I moved on to the pharmaceutical industry, working first at Novartis (then called Sandoz) and for the bulk of my career, at Pfizer, planning and conducting clinical drug testing programs.

About halfway through my work experience at Pfizer, I had an epiphany which is the point of this essay. I was traveling by plane to a clinical test site with a younger clinical research associate, who spent much of the flight talking about her worries as to what the next step in her career might be and her fears about the dire consequences of a wrong choice. Without thinking, I knew exactly what I wanted tell her and proceeded to do so. As long as you are doing something that seems worthwhile to you at that moment, there are no wrong choices or wasted time. Everything I had done had great value after I finished doing it although it wasn’t always obvious to me as I did it. First, the experience taught me some craft or knowledge that I could use elsewhere, and second, it guided me toward what I wanted to do (or avoid) next. Even odd stuff I tried for a while and abandoned, gave me breadth of knowledge that helped me enlarge my human relationships. A person who can talk about strategies in sudoku will be able to relate to some people with whom he would otherwise have nothing in common. A day or so after that plane trip, I realized that that young person was struggling with exactly the issues that had so troubled me 20 years earlier. For the first time, I came to some appreciation of what I had achieved in life and learned to treat myself a bit more kindly. It took a while for me to reach this point. A smarter person may figure them out from the outset, but for me, I can’t imagine gaining the understanding without going through the hard experiences.