WISE Archives: Oral History Collection

Singleton, Mary

Interview transcript portion:

TZB: What did you like about it?

MS: Chemistry was more challenging. I really had to think. I was learning something. I liked working in a lab. I liked working with me hands. It was just a lot of things. I liked the guys in the lab. They were a lot of fun. In fact, I met my husband in a chemistry lab. [laughter] So there was a lot going on with a chemistry class.

TZB: Were you the only girl or were there other women in the class?

MS: No, I wasn’t the only girl. There were quite a few women pre-med students, chemistry majors at Wheaton because a lot of women went into the missionary field, and went into medicine and then to the mission field. It wasn’t that unusual at Wheaton; the women were treated very well. And I think it came from this whole attitude of women being medical missionaries, and I had thought very seriously about being a medical missionary at that time.

TZB: But you knew you were going to major in chemistry. Had you—

MS: No, it took the first year. It was more I was still casting around about what major I would settle on.

TZB: Had you thought about what you were going to do beyond that or just—

MS: That was all decided by the fact that I fell in love and my boyfriend was from California, of all terrible places, and he was going into physics. And he was planning to go to graduate school in physics in California, and he was a year ahead of me. And so it just evolved that therefore I would go to wherever he went and study chemistry. It just happened—just one thing led to the other, when he got accepted at Berkeley in physics I just assumed I would go to Berkeley in chemistry. I had no idea what that meant—not—I’d never even been there. And—

TZB: [chuckles] So you made this decision kind of off the cuff and then——it’s amazing when you’re that age you do make decisions like that that change your whole life.

MS: And my father was very upset. He told him—he told my boyfriend, fiancé, that he had hoped I would get my Ph.D. before I got married. He was not happy at all about this arrangement. Anyway, you know, they—my parents went through putting on a nice wedding for us after I graduated. My fiancé came to Berkeley for a year in physics and then I—

TZB: You followed.

MS: —we got married in the summer and we came here together after I graduated.

TZB: And what was it like going into graduate school?

MS: It was total culture shock. Coming from Wheaton to Berkeley—

TZB: Which was such a supportive, nurturing atmosphere.

MS: I didn’t have a clue and nobody—nobody told me what was going on. Nobody stepped forward and said, “You need to find a research subject. You need to find an advisor.” No advisor asked me to work for them. They stuck me off as a T.A. in quantitative analysis with men—the men from India. They had several Indian male students—graduate students. And they put all of them and me way out of sight in chem-5, which was a required course for pre-med students. And the truth was the professor that was in charge of that course was very difficult. I had a very bad experience.

TZB: No one sat down with you and kind of oriented you to what you were supposed to be doing and—you were just kind of thrown to the wolves.

MS: I took my courses; I did fine, but got no offers from professors to join a group—none. And finally, Dr. Rappaport—I don’t know why; he was fairly new here—he said, “Would you like to do a little lab project with me?” He didn’t ask me to work on, you know, anything good, a good topic, but he said, “Just a little lab project here that you could write up.” You needed—probably—he was probably my advisor if I had one—and I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” So he set me up in a lab just with a workbench and some glassware and said, “Here, you know, this is your little project,” which I did and wrote it up. And then he said, “Maybe you want to just take the exam for the master’s degree that’s coming up soon.” And I said, “Oh, that’s a great idea. Why don’t I do that?” And so I did. I passed and they gave me my master’s degree and I went around looking for a job. So I—and I noticed from Wheaton there were only five “professional chemistry majors” who graduated together that year. Another one, a male, came to Berkeley, too. And as I look back, he had a project and a lab, an office and all those things—

TZB: Immediately.

MS: Immediately. And I don’t know what I thought. I just didn’t have any idea what was going on. I just thought, ‘Well, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do.’

TZB: And did you want to go on after that?

MS: I was sorry I didn’t go on.