Audio File
Transcript
My name is Clay Everett. I’m 14 years old.
My name is Donovan McKeever. I am 14 years old.
And we interviewed Dr. Andre Samuel on July 26, 2018.
My childhood was interesting. I was born in Germany. My father was black. He was stationed in the army at the time. My mother, my biological mother, was a German woman. I don’t remember a whole lot. I was four when we left Germany to come to the United States and to be quite honest, most of the memories I had weren’t really all that great. There was a lot of turmoil with my parents in my household. My parents were both addicts and alcoholics, and so you could imagine the kind of things that went on, and being such a young kid seeing that kind of stuff. And I was abandoned by my parents and adopted by my father’s legal wife and raised in Washington, DC.
I tried to thrive. I tried to do well. Like so many other youth, when they grow up and they have these issues with family and separations and stuff like that, a lot of us don’t really know how to deal with it. So I was very smart. I was good academically, but I acted out a lot behavior wise. And so, I was angry, you know, and I had male teachers that would try to influence me and direct me in the right way, but because I was lacking a father, I was like, “you’re not my father. You’re not going to tell me what to do.” And I knew that I was adopted by my mother, so there would be times where I’d be angry at her because it’s like, you know, “you’re not my real mom” and stuff like that.
Right after high school, I went straight to Tuskegee University, very historically black college and university, founded by Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver was a professor there in the Agricultural Department, and I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I enrolled as a pre vet major. That’s where I started off. It’s a prime example of how the issues we have growing up sometimes catch up with us, and so when I got to college, I had a reputation on campus for selling fake ID’s and doing some white collar type crime. And what happened was I actually ended up getting caught by the police. So I couldn’t go back, and what happened between the time I stopped going to Tuskegee and the time I went back to school, I think it was about a period of maybe three to four years, and during that time, I kind of got all the demons out. I got addicted to drugs. I ended up being homeless for a while. I actually ended up sleeping in abandoned buildings and on the streets in DC for some time until I decided to kick the habit and roll into a detox program and get clean, and when I got clean is when I decided to go back to school. And so, I transferred my credits from Tuskegee University to a university in DC called the University of the District of Columbia, and that’s where I finished my bachelors in science. And then after that, I was able to start working in the science field and eventually made it to graduate school, and I started working on my PhD. So as soon as I graduated from college, first job I got was working for this company called Covance. We would be in these huge rooms, rooms like this big or even twice as big. They would have these huge racks, and on both sides of the racks were these cages of rats and mice. And so I did that for a couple of years, and then I left that job, and I went to go work at George Washington University in DC. We were working on studies that used animals, so I did a lot of animal studies. And then after George Washington University, I came to Pittsburgh, and I worked at the University of Pittsburgh, and I got to work with monkeys for about 3 years.
We have been in the Hill District 4 years now. When I first moved to Pittsburgh in 2004, the first place I lived in in Pittsburgh was the Hill district. My big goal is to take what I am doing now, which is running the Citizen Science Lab, and making it a national model and eventually have a Citizen Science Lab in every community that needs a community laboratory for science education.
I have two kids. I have one boy and one girl. It’s pretty awesome actually. You get kind of nervous at the same time. For me, I thought it was very important to try to make sure that I don’t make the same mistakes my parents made. And then I try to help my kids not make the same mistakes that I made. And so, it really is a great experience. It’s an emotional experience, both up and down, right? I mean, sometimes you could be like, “Oh my God, I love these kids! They’re awesome!” And then sometimes you’d be like, “Oh, I want to kill them,” you know? That comes with the territory, but it’s a great experience, and I think that another reason why I was able to go through what I went through as a youth was so I would know how to stop this cycle when it was time for me to start raising kids and bringing kids into this world.