 Out of high school, he accepted a four-year scholarship to play baseball at Cleveland's Western Reserve University and during his freshman year, began working in the Cleveland State Mental Hospital.In order to avoid the military draft, Bower opted for graduate school, but his experiences in the mental hospital dissuaded him from a career as a psychiatrist.While Bower was attending Yale for his degree in Experimental Psychology, he discovered a passion for learning theory and presented his findings on dual reward-punishment in rats to the American Psychological Association.