Albert as a kid was pretty much what you'd expect an adult like Albert to be like as a kid. He was from a small town in the middle of nowhere somewhere in New England or so where everybody knew each other and more importantly, where everyone knew everybody else's business (hence why he hates small towns), and he had a grandma whom he loved who lived across the country in San Francisco. Once a year he'd fly out for a visit and stay with her for a couple weeks in the summer before school started up again, and it is from her that he derived his passion for justice and doing the Right Thing, and largely what set him on the path to developing the moral code he currently holds. I've also headcanoned that since she died (between fifteen and twenty years ago now), Albert writes a letter to her every year on his birthday, continuing his tradition of writing to her while she was alive to keep her up to speed on what he was doing with his life.
Growing up, he was your standard ridiculously smart nerdy loner type, but he actually never got picked on much because he was so good at cutting apart the bullies with scathing wit. And in a teeny town where everybody knows everybody else's business anyway, you can't just go and deck a kid who just verbally eviscerated you in front of the whole class, or you look like an even bigger musclehead than the kid just said you were. So largely they just left him alone, which in turn attracted Albert a small following of less-cunning but fairly equally nerdy underlings who liked to hang around him so that they wouldn't get picked on either, and thus Albert became the Alpha Nerd of his little group of nerdlings at his school.
He was always the top of his class, he got a scholarship so that he could go to college, and ultimately (canonically) ended up first in his class at Yale. So dude is really hella smart. I also think he got interested in forensics pretty early on, and that's what led him to the FBI — shopping around for a career that would basically let him do ALL SCIENCE ALL DAY ERRYDAY but then came with the added bonus of bringing criminals and evildoers to justice while he was at it, which is very much relevant to Albert's interest. He likes the knowledge that his efforts are leading to the capture of bad guys and on some small level making the world a better place. Sometimes that's what gets him through the day.
He did consider some other private-sector jobs, but I think he pretty much always knew that "government agent / forensic pathologist" was his endgame. From his perspective, there is a very heavy element of "I need to do this because I am the best and I have the stomach for it and if I do it, it will get done and get done right and these people will not have died in vain." Albert's got a hard, nasty, tedious job, but that's okay with him because he knows he's resilient to a point long past where a lot of other people would crack. That's why he sticks with it. Because it needs to get done and someone needs to do it and he's the best at it, so tl;dr he's got work to do, dammit. Now get out of his way and let him do it.
I maintain, though, that someday when he's put in his years at the Bureau, he'll switch over to academia so he can train up the next wave of forensic pathologists according to his high and exacting standards. Everybody hates Professor Rosenfield's class, but by god if you're in it, you're going to walk out the best.
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Albert as a kid was pretty much what you'd expect an adult like Albert to be like as a kid. He was from a small town in the middle of nowhere somewhere in New England or so where everybody knew each other and more importantly, where everyone knew everybody else's business (hence why he hates small towns), and he had a grandma whom he loved who lived across the country in San Francisco. Once a year he'd fly out for a visit and stay with her for a couple weeks in the summer before school started up again, and it is from her that he derived his passion for justice and doing the Right Thing, and largely what set him on the path to developing the moral code he currently holds. I've also headcanoned that since she died (between fifteen and twenty years ago now), Albert writes a letter to her every year on his birthday, continuing his tradition of writing to her while she was alive to keep her up to speed on what he was doing with his life.
Growing up, he was your standard ridiculously smart nerdy loner type, but he actually never got picked on much because he was so good at cutting apart the bullies with scathing wit. And in a teeny town where everybody knows everybody else's business anyway, you can't just go and deck a kid who just verbally eviscerated you in front of the whole class, or you look like an even bigger musclehead than the kid just said you were. So largely they just left him alone, which in turn attracted Albert a small following of less-cunning but fairly equally nerdy underlings who liked to hang around him so that they wouldn't get picked on either, and thus Albert became the Alpha Nerd of his little group of nerdlings at his school.
He was always the top of his class, he got a scholarship so that he could go to college, and ultimately (canonically) ended up first in his class at Yale. So dude is really hella smart. I also think he got interested in forensics pretty early on, and that's what led him to the FBI — shopping around for a career that would basically let him do ALL SCIENCE ALL DAY ERRYDAY but then came with the added bonus of bringing criminals and evildoers to justice while he was at it, which is very much relevant to Albert's interest. He likes the knowledge that his efforts are leading to the capture of bad guys and on some small level making the world a better place. Sometimes that's what gets him through the day.
He did consider some other private-sector jobs, but I think he pretty much always knew that "government agent / forensic pathologist" was his endgame. From his perspective, there is a very heavy element of "I need to do this because I am the best and I have the stomach for it and if I do it, it will get done and get done right and these people will not have died in vain." Albert's got a hard, nasty, tedious job, but that's okay with him because he knows he's resilient to a point long past where a lot of other people would crack. That's why he sticks with it. Because it needs to get done and someone needs to do it and he's the best at it, so tl;dr he's got work to do, dammit. Now get out of his way and let him do it.
I maintain, though, that someday when he's put in his years at the Bureau, he'll switch over to academia so he can train up the next wave of forensic pathologists according to his high and exacting standards. Everybody hates Professor Rosenfield's class, but by god if you're in it, you're going to walk out the best.