I am like the average American who ends up in a career by accident.

Sonja Marchand’s work experience began early and has taken many turns. She is now in higher education because of her reaction to an assignment during the Vietnam War. Marchand is the director of the Division of Business and Industry Services at Cal State Northridge. She and her husband, Robert, live in the Hollywood Hills.

I got my first job at 8 when I subcontracted a paper route from a boy across the street because the local El Paso papers would not give paper routes to young girls. So I cut a deal with him. He took 60% and I took 40%, and he delivered the morning paper and did the collections. I delivered the afternoon paper. And I have been continuously employed since I was 8 years old.

I grew up in a family which had three businesses going at the same time.

We had a discount business, called the Rocket Store, long before people knew what discount businesses were. And we had a classic 1950s drive-in restaurant, the Rocket Drive-In. The third business was really interesting. We had pinball machines and jukeboxes in bars and cafes. Every Saturday, I would jump in the truck and make the rounds and collect the money at the bars and the cafes. My dad taught me how to do the simple repairs on the machines if the relays weren’t working. We changed the records every week to the top 50 in Billboard. So it was a real ‘50s life.

It was a good time-management course for me and a pretty heavy dose of reality therapy. I was told to get busy, go to work, observe the processes. I learned to do the payroll for all the employees and compute the tax, learn by doing, learn by asking questions. I learned that people work very hard to make a living. I didn’t have a date in high school because I was too busy.

I graduated in 1958 from Texas Western College, It’s now University of Texas El Paso. I was a geology major.

There were no on-campus interviews with any science graduate. So I went back to school and did graduate work in economics and modern languages and left the whole field of geology.

In my part of the country at that time there was no such thing as career counseling for students. I think I am like the average American who ends up in a career by accident rather than by a plan.

I went to work at White Sands Missile Range for Western Electric Co., where we were making bigger and better missiles. I started out as a technical editor, editing maintenance and repair manuals on the Nike Hercules and the Nike Zeus missile systems. I went on to American Machine and Foundry at Vandenburg Air Force base and Litton Industries here in Southern California.

At the height of the Vietnam War in 1965, I was part of a design team at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. I was the only writer that they put into this crowd, lots of engineers, some quality-control people. They put us into a room and said, “You’re going to stay in here until you come up with an anti-personnel weapon for combat. It has to be small, and it has to have a high kill ratio.”

My stomach really started turning over. We came up with the fragmentation grenade. It was an incredible experience. I found it repugnant, so I quit. I decided I needed to do something else.

A friend of mine suggested that I call somebody at UCLA, and I went to work over there. I’ve spent the bulk of my time in higher education, some of it as a fund-raiser but more of it as a program person in continuing or adult education.

I think education is more fulfilling, more satisfying than trying to figure out weapons to kill people. There’s more satisfaction in being even a small part in the educational process, in somebody’s life than there is in writing a manual on how to blow up somebody.

I care passionately about education for the adult learner. I think that most of us use just a fraction of our potential. My motivation comes from the belief that it’s important to provide opportunities for people, to increase their knowledge.