“Knocking on Doors that Opened for Me” describes the life of Lauren B. Resnick, from growing up in New York City with a mother who refused to allow limits to be placed on her daughter, to a defining moment at Radcliffe College, to a Harvard graduate degree and a long career in cognitive psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Resnick writes of beginning as a research assistant at the Learning Research and Development Center at Pitt, one of the regional labs funded by the federal government, and ultimately rising to become its director. The chapter describes Resnick’s cofounding of the Institute for Learning and New Standards, organizations that linked researchers with practitioners, as well as her leadership roles in APA and AERA. Throughout, she conveys the excitement of being part of the field when fixed ideas about learning were being challenged both from within cognitive psychology and from new disciplines in the social sciences, broadening our conception of human capacity.