Well, I certainly was not going to study physics, and I knew I was not going to study biology, but I could have become a sociologist or an anthropologist. However, I found sociology a little soft. I think that somewhere in my mind, I probably already had the notion – which turned out to be right – that if I was going to be a social scientist of some kind, I would like a rigorous social science. The analytical aspect of economics already appealed to me. That must have been so. It was not really a matter of chance. But if my wife had said ‘oh, no, economics was terribly boring’, I would probably have found something else to do.

I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing … I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.

I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain.

From 1931 to 1935, I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my father's old college, Gonville and Caius, which was particularly strong in medicine and the law. However, after two years of law I switched to economics, much to my father's disappointment. At that time the world was in the depth of the great depression and my motive for wanting to change subject was the belief, bred of youthful ignorance and optimism, that if only economics were better understood, the world would be a better place.

I was an English major. I studied a lot of English literature, so got interested in the literary magazine and was a contributing editor. That's the closest I got to journalism then, but I always hankered to get into news.

When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only the beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the making of an industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks that success must expect; but of things with a past, things that had made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the face now, for this was an old college as things west of the Alleghenies were reckoned-an old college in an old town. Here was history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.

He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.

When I was in college, I wanted to know more about my Native American past because I come from one of the 64 Native groups that are very much alive [in Mexico]. But there was nothing like that. So I ended up designing my own major that included women’s studies, philosophy, and anthropology.

…When you have that sort of background, being an actor in Hollywood is like the wildest, most far-fetched occupation that you can think of and I kind of fell into acting because I was initially interested in writing when I was younger and I went to college initially thinking that I was gonna major in creative writing and that didn’t work out. I ended up studying film instead because I thought it was also another form of storytelling…

I decided to become a physicist when I read ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer.

A writer? What education did I receive? None. Where did I study? Nowhere. What did I study? It does not matter. I nonetheless became a writer immediately, because I wrote more than I have ever read; hence I thought more than I had food for thought.

I wanted to go to college to be a journalist and follow in my dad's work. And then I became an actor.

Because I wanted to see myself in writing the history of the African woman. I started off as a Theatre major in my first degree. (Theatre, Music and dance) and after that, I decided to do documentary and film making. I wanted to do the kind of documentary that tells our story and in order to do that, I felt that I needed to do history, although I didn’t like history. I didn’t have a good history teacher, but when I went to University of California, where I did my Masters and PhD, I met a professor who later became my mentor who turned me around. He told history as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. A story that I could relate to and I remember. I looked at him and said this is exactly what I want to do.

Like many a freshman with dangerous leanings toward the Humanities, Noel circled the topic of choosing a major cautiously, occasionally poking it with a stick to see which way it lunged and which way he should jump to avoid it.