It was 2004, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, had just landed a job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She hadn’t planned on becoming a professor. But faculty members and fellow students kept sending her an ad for the position. It seemed like a long shot — she hadn’t finished a single chapter of her dissertation — but she got an interview. "I arrived here at 10 p.m. in the middle of a snowstorm," she says, "and the chair of the department was there to greet me and take me out to dinner. And I felt like I was home."

March 11, 2016 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education