Interviews of the Margaret Macvicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project, MC 356 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Interviews of the Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project, MC 356 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections Carle Pieters – classes of 1971, 1972 and 1977 Interviewed by Emma Bernstein, class of 2020 April 6, 2019 MIT Libraries Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project Carle Pieters (SB ’71, SM ’72 and PhD ’77) was interviewed by Emma Bernstein (SB Computer Science and Molecular Biology 2020) in Providence, Rhode Island on April 6, 2019. Dr. Pieters – whose affinities for mathematics and astronomy were apparent early on – is Professor Emerita of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, and has been a faculty member since 1980. She previously worked at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on Borneo. Most generally, her research efforts include planetary exploration and evolution of planetary surfaces, with an emphasis on remote compositional analyses. Dr. Pieters – who earned a BA in Math Education at Antioch College before earning her SB, SM and PhD degrees and MIT – was the founder and initial Science Manager of the NASA Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB), a NASA-supported multi-user spectroscopy facility at Brown. She has been Principal Investigator for NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) experiment launched to the Moon in 2008 onboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, and is Co- Investigator on Dawn, a mission to explore the large asteroids Vesta and Ceres. BERNSTEIN: Could you please tell me a little bit about your childhood – where you grew up and what your interests were? PIETERS: OK. I'm an army brat. That's what shaped my childhood. What that meant was that we moved every couple of years and all over the country, all over the world. That was a big influence on me, in that I still love to travel and that it took me a while to feel settled in any one place. I was born in Oklahoma and went from place to place to place. My dad was stationed in Iran when I was in grade school. Then we went to Texas and then to Nevada. In Nevada, I spent junior high school and started high school. That was really important in my life because where we lived was in Carson City, which is right at the edge of where sort of the rolling desert meets the mountains. It's high altitude, dry, but you've got mountains and skiing and pines right next door, a beautiful country. That environment just seeped into me. I loved it. I guess it was my freshman year in high school when my dad got assigned to a major activity where it required both him and my mother to spend two years in various schools learning languages and political stuff – and they would be moving every six months. My older brother and sister had just gone off to college, so they were OK. My younger sister went to live with my grandmother in California. I stayed with friends in Nevada, and they sort of took me in. I was able to stay with my friends in local high school and, during summers, would go to wherever my parents were at the time. We'd have family activities, so that turned out really well. My last year in high school was spent in Heidelberg, Germany, which was the last place my dad was stationed. Then he retired and went into high school math teaching as a retired officer. But from my high school in Germany, I was applying to colleges and didn't really have a clue. So it was, “Oh, Stanford. I've heard of Stanford.” So I applied to Stanford and a couple other schools. My sister was spending a junior year abroad and was at the University of Tubingen in Germany. And she says, “Well, Carle, there are some students here who are from a small school in Ohio called Antioch and it sounds like a really interesting program.” So I looked into it. They had a work/study program where you spend time on campus and then you go out on a job for a term. Then you come back to campus, and then you go out on another job. It takes five years instead of four years to get a typical undergraduate degree, but you have all this wonderful work experience. I said, “That sounds cool.” I applied there. I didn't get into Stanford, but I wasn't too surprised. I did go to Antioch, the small school in Ohio. And my dad thought, “Oh, this is great. She can earn her way through college.” Little did anybody know it was one of the most liberal schools in the country at the time. Off I went, and really enjoyed it. I got this note from my parents saying, “Don't join this. Don't join that.” I said, “Oh, OK.” But it was a good time. It was a small liberal arts school, and because it was small, it encouraged a lot of initiative by individual students. At that time, I knew I was good at math. I took a lot of math courses and figured I'd do something using math. I kept asking people, “What can I use math for?” And they said, “Well, you can be an accountant. You can be an actuary.” None of those sounded very interesting to me. I kept taking ‘what's your aptitude’ exams. It depended on whether I'd been listening to music before the exam or philosophy. So I ended up thinking, “Oh, I want to be a conductor.” It didn't help at all! I did have all these jobs, and that was good. That gave me perspective and different experience in different places. I thought some psychology combination, so I did a lot of educational kinds of things. But again, they didn't quite click. I thought, “Well, I better have something before I leave school so I can get a job, so I took the requirements for getting a teaching certificate so I could teach high school math. And that worked out fine. So I graduated, had a teaching certificate, and got a job teaching math in Somerville [Massachusetts], a big school, a city school. Pretty tough kids there – at least at that time they were. I love teaching but was a failure at being a disciplinarian. Here's this young lady who loves what she's doing but is not a disciplinarian. I would have some of the noisiest classrooms in the school. I liked the kids, but I realized I didn't have that talent. I had serious questions about whether I wanted to or whether I should be a high school math teacher, just because I didn't seem to have some of the qualifications. About that time, the person I was married to at the time and I – he was just finishing his undergraduate class, and we decided to go into the Peace Corps. So we both applied and were accepted. Of course, that was the middle of the Vietnam issue, so everything was tense. That was one of the reasons why we wanted to get out, because the draft was still going, and for males, that was a big, big challenge. So we ended up going to Malaysia. In particular, we ended up being assigned to Sarawak, which is on the island of Borneo, in a school, to teach. It was a junior high school level, and I loved that. The students were eager. They were very committed to learning. It turned out that, instead of teaching math, the science teacher at the school we were at had left. They didn't have anybody to teach science, and of the handful of teachers they had, one person said, “Well, I can teach math. But [you] can teach science.” So I ended up teaching science, and I loved that. Here I was in a different situation teaching, but a much more positive experience, working with a diverse group of kids. Malaysia at that time – and still is – a very multicultural environment. Major cultures: Chinese, Indian and Malay. And on Borneo, we didn't have many Indians, but we had local hill people who did a lot of agriculture way upriver. Each of them had their own completely different cultures and were all together in the school. And the school – in hindsight, a large fraction; I can't say whether it was a third or half – were students that came and boarded there because they lived upriver. People lived out far away from where cities or villages were. These junior high students were away from home and were in essentially boarding schools and did fine. It wasn't traumatic for them. They did really well. In fact, I learned a lot from them. Sorry, this is a little diversion, but I wanted to have a chicken, and the shopkeeper in town says, “Oh, I can get you a chicken. OK, yeah. I'll get you a chicken.” And so this chicken showed up at my door. It was a full chicken, with feathers and everything. And I said, “What am I going to do with this?” I had no idea of what to do. But my students knew. “Of course, well, I know how to kill a chicken. I know how to de-feather a chicken.” So I said, “Oh, please take it. I'll give you part of the chicken.” So that problem was solved, and I was very appreciative. BERNSTEIN: What about when you came back to the United States? PIETERS: Before we went into the Peace Corps, when I was teaching high school in Somerville, I realized I'm going to want to go back to school, because teaching high school math is probably not the best thing for my long-term career.