When I'm teaching a course for students interested in careers in sexuality or facilitating a workshop at conferences like the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, I usually ask them to tell me what brought them to sexuality studies.  While I have met one or two folks whose parents were sexuality educators and they knew from a young age that they would follow the family business, it is fairly rare that many of us showed up on "Career Day" in school dressed as a sexuality educator or researcher.  (Could you imagine the look on the teachers and career counselors faces?) I often hear about experiences, such as classes or volunteer opportunities, where someone realized that it was their calling to study and teach about sex and sexuality.

I had a similar experience when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin studying biology.  Since I was a young boy, I dreamt of being a scientist working in a lab and performing all sorts of cool experiments (it was either that or become a chef - I dressed as each for career days in 5th and 6th grades, respectively) until I began studying to be a biologist and discovered how monotonous and tedious most of the work was - not to mention how horribly isolating it was to work in a lab.  During my junior year, I enrolled in a human sexuality course - one of those huge survey courses - and felt a spark that ignited...