In this interview Valentine L. Telegdi discusses his graduate work at Lausanne University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; how Victor Weisskopf and Gregor Wentzel were instrumental in his appointment as an instructor at the University of Chicago in 1951, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann. In 1954, after Enrico Fermi's death, Telegdi became the head of Fermi's Nuclear Emulsion Group there and in 1956, he went to the Institute for Advanced Study for three months. Later that year, he and Jerome I. Friedman found parity violation in muon decay, in parallel with the work of Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia and her collaborators at the National Bureau of Stands, and that of Richard L. Garwin, Leon M. Lederman, and Marcel Weinrich at Columbia. In 1959-1960, Telegdi worked with Garwin at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon; his visiting lectureship at Harvard University; being elected in 1968 to the National Academy of Sciences; later went back to Switzerland and led a group at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) doing atomic physics and had a joint appointment at CERN, heading a particle physics group. He later began going regularly to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he worked with Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, and Felix Boehm.