FROM AN American perspective, my upbringing in Northport, Long Island, New York, were typically suburban and middle class. I was educated in the local public school system and, while I was always aware of my Ulster Protestant roots, they were never a focus of family life.

I grew up in an environment which honoured education. When I told my mother, a teacher, that it was my ambition to study for a PhD, she was delighted.

At high school in the late 1950s and early '60s - the era of Sputnik - the educational push was on the sciences. I particularly enjoyed chemistry, physics and higher-level maths. I was also very involved in sports and played the French horn in the school orchestra. It was a rich, broad experience which prepared me well for university life.

I went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I studied chemistry. I completed my degree programme in three years thanks to the enriched science education that I had received in high school.

After I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Illinois, my whole career orientation changed. I became active in campus politics and began to find the solitary life of the chemistry researcher less attractive than that of the political activist.

I helped to found the Graduate Students' Association, which fought for graduate rights, and came to realise that a law degree would be a more appropriate tool for my new role in advocacy.

Armed with a master's degree in chemistry, I went to law school at Yale, where I became involved in providing legal services to low-income people. After graduation I took a job with the poverty law programme in the city where Yale is based, New Haven, Connecticut. I eventually became executive director, but left to run for Congress in 1982.

The constituency I represented contained a strong Irish-American group, with which I began to work. Their interests were closely associated with many of the issues I cared about in Congress, including human rights and immigration.

You could argue that most of my education has had little bearing on my subsequent career path, but the skills I gained from my education - including learning to think creatively and to solve problems analytically - have been far more important than the subject matter.