Professor Sophia Pierroutsakos said the process was messy.
By: Jools Pulcher, Art & Life Editor
Meramec Professor Sophia Pierroutsakos has always been searching for her path, both in her personal and professional life.
After moving to Greece as a child, then Florida and ultimately St. Louis when she was in seventh grade, where she was shocked to find herself “landlocked.”
She said she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to pursue as her career and the exploration began. “I think it’s important for students to hear about how messy my journey was,” said Pierroutsakos. “Even just figuring out my major was messy.”
After high school, Pierroutsakos attended Washington University and obtained a bachelor’s in psychology with a minor in political science.
However, she thought she wanted to pursue law at some point. “I spent three weeks talking about law and attended the Missouri Scholars Academy, focused on law,” she said. “And then, at some point just realized that the more I got into it [law], it was wonderful but not for me.”
Pierroutsakos said she decided to take a year off. Next, she found herself applying to graduate school for political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a few classes in international relations and discovered it wasn’t for her, leading to a change in major to psychology, she said.
“I don’t think I meant to be a clinical psychologist,” she said. “I knew I would have a hard time not taking all of that home and wasn’t listening closely enough to realize there were a bunch of other kinds of ways to be a psychologist.”
Pierroutsakos eventually found developmental psychology.
“I enjoyed doing research and running my own laboratory in my first five years as an assistant professor elsewhere,” she said.
While she said she enjoyed her work, she also missed teaching and her family, which resulted in a move back to St. Louis in 2004 and a job at St. Louis Community College at Meramec.
She said her experiences allow her to empathize with students who are unsure about their paths.
“I was sure and I was wrong,” said Pierroutsakos. “It’s okay not to know what you want to be. It’s okay to change your mind.”
Pierroutsakos said that most people are going to change their minds in different ways about careers many times.
“I try to remind students that my path and their path is messy,” she said. “That’s why I’m a person whose professional life and personal life intertwine and I try to live what I teach. I try to help students learn for their own personal lives what science can teach them.”
