47 How I Became a Professor
Being a professor was the last thing I had seen myself doing. As an undergraduate I was tired of the arrogance of my professors and I was looking forward to graduating and starting a career in geography with the Conservation Corps, urban planning, or the Soil Conservation Service. In my senior year at the University of Colorado, one Professor, A. David Hill, took me aside and encouraged me to apply to graduate school because he felt my decent undergraduate grades and my Peace Corps experience would make me a good candidate.
I took the encouragement and applied to several graduate schools around the country. They all accepted me, but only one offered financial support. That was the University of Florida who wanted me for my Portuguese speaking ability.
My wife, Mary and I arrived in Florida late in the summer of 1969 and began the odyssey of graduate school. I enrolled in several geography courses and found myself keeping up and enjoying the work. With the onset of the first quarter, I developed a statistical paper on the shifting boundaries of citrus growing in Florida. I was encouraged to develop that into a MA thesis. In the next quarter, in my Historical Geography course, I produced another chapter on the origins of citrus and its arrival with the Spaniards in the 1500s. I did a lot of traveling around Florida looking at the citrus, talking to growers and educating myself. Mary was a major supporter, encouraging and editing. The thesis focused on the more than century long, southerly geographic shift of the citrus growing area in Florida.
As I was writing the thesis during the third quarter, Professor Jim Anderson, the chair of the Geography Department came to me and told me that the faculty wanted me to continue onto the PhD program and they would award me a teaching assistantship to finance my next year. The doctorate would focus on a topic that I had originally planned on “land use” in interior Brazil.
I accepted the offer, as I could follow up on my Peace Corps connection in Mato Grosso, Brazil and use my fluency in Portuguese. I delayed the completion of the master’s degree for a couple of school terms and began planning my course work strategy for this new endeavor. I also began seeking a grant to support my overseas PhD research. It was then that the idea of being a professor began to materialize.
My parents back in Colorado had for years been cultivating friendships with professors from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado. They had served as mentors for me as I grew up and were open to many questions, including those about my future career. Being that I had thoroughly enjoyed teaching as a graduate assistant, I felt more comfortable with an academic career.
I was awarded a Fulbright grant to fund my research field work in Brazil and completed the research and returned to Florida in January 1973. I began supporting myself as a graduate student, teaching as an adjunct. While teaching and writing, I completed the Doctoral dissertation in May 1974.
As for pursuing the career of a professor, those types of jobs were rather scarce in 1974 and I took a job with the State of Florida as a bureaucrat with the Manpower Project. In early August 1974, I received a telegram from the Geography Department at the University of Khartoum in Sudan asking me to start teaching with them in September. I had forgotten that I had answered their job ad back in February and I had apparently missed some communications along the way, as I was not considering it as an option.
Fortune had arrived! I jumped at it! Having worked two years in the Peace Corps in Brazil, I had learned that I could work anywhere in the world as long as they were not at war! Dad’s old professor friend, H. H. Stonaker urged me to go ahead with the adventure. The Sudanese embassy in Washington told me all about the contract and they covered all our family moving expenses. So, I began my career as a professor in Africa.