She recalls one experience many years ago when she had the "mind-boggling" summer task of cataloging all the scientific articles they had received by subject.

"I was reading how the Himalayas were formed, when the Indian plate moved up in onto Gondwanaland," Pilot says. "I was just fascinated, and I had to read the whole thing."

Gould has always been supportive of her interests in this area, she says, encouraging her to attend seminars and conferences.

"Not that I can repeat everything, but it changed my worldview in the natural sciences," Pilot says.

Manuel J. Lim, secretary to Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, says he came to the job having no interest in law as a career.

"Never in a million years would I have envisioned myself working for a lawyer, much less so for someone like Professor Dershowitz," he says. "One of the things that is rewarding and sometimes frustrating about this job is that there really isn't a typical schedule each day," he says.

Assistants say they have to develop cross-discipline savvy for professors like Dershowitz, whose activities range from the academic to the administrative to the scholarly to the media-centric.

"In a given day," says Lim, "I will send out his latest syndicated column, talk to a producer of Rivera Live about a segment he will appear on that night and schedule him for a speaking engagement either on or off campus."