One can imagine the path to becoming a university professor and researcher — a stepwise course of excelling as an undergraduate, then research assistant, graduate student and postdoc before being hired to a tenure track position.
In the case of Dr. Rebecca Todd, principal investigator of the UBC Motivated Cognition Lab and an associate psychology professor, the story is considerably more relatable than the one outlined above.
Todd — who warmly invited me to call her Beck — told of her uneasiness in those first days as an undergraduate student at McGill University. She recalled that by the second week of her undergrad, her professors insisted that students declare their major.
“I remember going into the counsellor’s office and getting this long list of majors and I didn’t know what two-thirds of them were. I was like, ‘Yeah political science — maybe that’d be interesting.’”
After completing her requirements for a major in political science, Todd dipped into various literature and theatre courses and clubs that she “thought were fun.”
What became most important to Todd over the course of her degree was breaking a mental barrier fortified with all the reasons against her not committing to the career she longed to pursue.
“I thought as an undergrad there were all kinds of things I couldn’t do. I thought I couldn’t do science because I’d gone and gotten high during math class in high school and hadn’t really focused,” she said with a laugh. “And I thought that I couldn’t go into dance professionally because I wasn’t super bendy or super fearless. I didn’t have the qualities of a super dancer.”
But Todd realized that it didn’t matter if she didn’t have the skills demanded of a high-level dancer to become a choreographer, which was what she really wanted to do.
Todd set off for England and began studying at the London Contemporary Dance School and took up a “fun job” in the Forbidden Planet bookstore, as well as gigs as a “bad waitress.”
But after a year of dancing and working and dancing some more, Todd was “tired all the time” and conceded this wasn’t “going where I wanted to go.”
She applied to various graduate dance programs in North America. UCLA accepted her into its Master of Fine Arts in dance program.
Having completed her degree, Todd went on to perform on LA’s Skid Row. She recalled those times with a certain wonder in her voice.
“And then, you know, different things happen,” Todd said. She married, became a parent, divorced, moved to Montréal, then Toronto and established herself as an independent choreographer. She had become what she had set out to be — but that didn’t mean the pursuit of what interested her had ended.
As writing had “always come fairly easy” to her, Todd began working as an arts and dance journalist. But she wasn’t done there. Through her reading, writing, choreography, dance and marriage to a cognitive scientist, she began thinking more intently about “how the mind works in action,” as she put it.
While living in Toronto, Todd collaborated with a neuroscientist from McGill on a dance piece called Dendrite. The link between dance and cognition became more apparent.
“I was still doing this improvisational work where I thought, ‘Well, you know, dancers really are cognitive scientists.’ They really are exploring through improvisation how the mind works in action, understanding perception, memory, emotion, how they all interact,” said Todd.
She realized that people in neuroscience were studying the very questions she confronted through her art form.
“I just had a whole inner nerd that was underdeveloped, that I needed to develop,” Todd said.
She enrolled in courses at the University of Toronto, got accepted into their developmental science program and completed her PhD and a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience in Toronto on the interaction between emotion, motivation and cognition.
Today, Todd leads an active, highly collaborative lab while mentoring students from diverse scientific and artistic backgrounds.
“I think almost everybody in my lab has training in one art form or another,” she said.
When pursuing one’s goals, Todd advised students not to be put off by concerns about not having the proper qualifications to pursue their interests.
“You don’t want to be fully delusional,” qualifying her previous remark with a grin, “But I think a lot of these are just ideas we’ve picked up about how the world works. It isn’t necessarily so … you don’t always have to wait for the endorsement of the authorities of the world to be able to do something.”
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