In this interview, John Bardeen recounts his early career: undergraduate education in electrical engineering, work in geophysics while employed by the Gulf Oil Company in Pittsburgh, the departments of mathematics and physics at Princeton University, and his role as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He talks about Eugene Wigner, John Van Vleck, and John Slater as pioneers of solid-state physics. Bardeen describes his years at Princeton University and the close relationship between the mathematics and physics departments in those years.