iMahal Interview Series:
David Gimbel
July 22, 2001

iMahal:  It is early in your career. How many years do you think it will be before you start mentoring others?
Gimbel:  I think on some level I've already started doing it. I was fortunate to be able to teach for a semester at the University of Vienna and to train some of its students at our excavation in Syria. I also get a tremendous amount of email from all sorts of people. I remember last year sitting in a restaurant in New York with my fiancée. I looked over at the next table and there was this college kid, reading a book that appeared to have Sumerian characters in it. I said, "I hate to be intrusive, but are you studying Sumerian?" And the guy said, "I'm trying to plod through this and I'm trying to figure out certain things about it..." He and I had a series of running email discussions. He was working on a project having something to do with Sumerian music and I was able to give him some information about the religion and about Sumerian liturgical hymns. I try to make myself available to anybody that I can. Of course you have to set boundaries, because you have to get your work done, and you'll also run into some loony people to whom you have to say, "look, I'm sorry but you're calling me every five minutes." But I think it's always important to make yourself available. A lot of people have made themselves available to me.

David Gimbel

I answer almost every single email that I get, every letter I get. It may take me a while. I may have a lot of other stuff I have to get through first, but I think it's important always to get back to people, always to try to make time for them. I think that it's important to never lose light of that. The day that you start saying that you're too busy to have human contact is the day that you've really lost something. I think I learned a lot about this actually from my fiancé, because Filipinos have this very deep family structure. Maybe that's a bad generalization, maybe it's not. But I think that the way they view life is very different. Americans tend to view their identity as their job, and then they come home to their family. Filipinos and maybe a lot of other cultures, Spanish people as well, view their jobs as something they have to do so that they can be with their family. That's a very different cultural conception, and it's one that I really like. You can feel totally passionate about what you do in your professional life, and that will add a lot to your life psychologically and on every other level. But you shouldn't forget that the primary feature in life is the human dimension. There will never be anything more important than the contact that you have with other people. I would feel very happy if at the end of my life I was able to look back and say, "okay, I had a positive influence on the lives of half a dozen people."

family upbringing culture fascists Wesleyan

Columbia mentors doctorate Harvard Oxford

motivation Vijayanagara startup Archaeos projects

technology website learning advice mentoring

All photographs copyright and courtesy of David Gimbel or Archaeos