Observant Student

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="325" caption="Jennifer and Sam"]

When Jennifer Anderson, Ed.M.'09, was about seven years old, she would sit on the floor of her bedroom in Brookline, Mass., with a row of toys and stuffed animals facing her little brother, Sam, who was four years younger. Patiently she would watch. And wait. And then he'd make his move.

"I'd go running into the living room and report to my parents, 'He chose the blue one!'" Anderson says.

It was her way of recreating the many observational studies that both she and her brother had been a part of at Harvard while her father, Donald, was getting his Ph.D. in clinical psychology and her mother, Betsy, was working as a research assistant in the psychology department. There was even a study done by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that Anderson was reminded of last June at commencement.

"After the ceremony, I was having dinner with my family and friends when my mom pulled out a letter," Anderson says. It was dated September 10, 1974, and thanked her parents for allowing the research team to follow Anderson at the Harvard Law School Child Care Center for a year.

"How funny to look at the stationery and see the words Larsen Hall at the top of the page," she says. "It was a nice way of capping off my year back in Cambridge. It felt like I had come full circle."

Now living in Indonesia with her husband and two children, ages three and seven, Anderson wonders how much that experience of being involved in studies and growing up in an education-rich environment has influenced what she has done with her life. A glance at her resume speaks volumes: She's worked, both in the United States and abroad, at child development centers, schools, universities, and volunteer teaching programs. A few years ago, she cofounded a bilingual school in Bali, Indonesia.

"I feel lucky to have had these early educational experiences and to have grown up in the Boston area," she says. "I realize that's what fueled my interest in a good education for everyone. I've seen what a great school can look like."