Tales from the jar side: Starting my original career path, which didn't work out at all

Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 30 - July 7, 2019. This week I taught a Spring and Spring Boot course online, and we had our 4th of July holiday, which generated some complicated feelings that I won't go into here.

I'm a bit delayed today because this afternoon I sang at a memorial service for a long-time choir member at the church where my wife is the soprano section leader. I didn't know Liz Web all that well, unfortunately (the more I learned about her amazing life the more I realized I missed out by not getting to know her better), but my wife adored her. I was there to pay my respects and to help fill out the tenor section of the choir, which meant there were two of us.

It partly reminded me that as I get older, these events are going to happen more and more frequently. Listening to her family tell stories about her made me feel that it's probably worth spending this time telling my own stories in this newsletter. Last week's edition dug into some personal history, specifically around my path through the general exams at Princeton on the way to my Ph.D., and the responses were more favorable than I expected. This week, therefore, I'll talk a bit about the winding path that led me to my current career.

As always, if you're not interested for any reason, please feel free to unsubscribe. The positive feedback I'm getting from a handful of you every week has been very validating, and I'm going to continue doing this for a while.

When I was a kid, I told everyone I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I didn't really want that -- it's just that I was really good at the Game of School, and I'd heard that career required staying in school the longest, so that's what I wanted to do. As I learned more about what a doctor really did, I became a lot less interested, partly because of all the blood and partly because of the suffering, which I knew I couldn't handle.

I therefore went back to my first love, which was astronomy. I was a kid during the Apollo era. I remember building my own lunar lander out of a Dixie cup and some legs from some game that involved bugs and flying it all around the house. I really wanted to go to space. I loved Star Trek (original series), though I mostly remember it in reruns. What I really wanted was to be Captain James T. Kirk, Hero of the Galaxy, in command of the Starship Enterprise. The fact that Starfleet Academy didn't exist yet was a problem, but seemingly not an insurmountable one. The Moon landings put us way ahead of most projections on when we would go to space, and there was no reason to believe that wouldn't continue. The mid-70s saw a huge drop in funding for the entire space program, however, to my immense disappointment. We were supposed to have space stations and populated colonies on the moon by the time I was ready to go to college, but that became less likely with every passing year.

My compromise was to become a physicist. I read biographies of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others, and I bought but didn't really understand the Feymann Lectures on Physics (the first books I actually ordered from a bookstore), so that became my new dream. Astrophysics combined lots of schooling with lots of math (which I really liked) with (apparently) lots of glory, which I also wanted. Another great feature was that I could do everything by just thinking and using a pencil, which was quite appealing for an undersized asthmatic who was allergic to seemingly everything. Since it seemed less and less likely I was going to be a quarterback in the NFL or even a power-hitting outfielder in the major leagues, and since the space program wasn't going to be ready for me to take command of a starship, I would have to settle for revolutionizing everything we knew about the physical world. I could study quasars and cosmology and black holes, and if I had to do something practical, inventing a Warp Drive seemed like a good place to start.

By the time I reached high school, I couldn't wait to take physics. It really annoyed me that I had to take biology and chemistry first, but I needed the math for physics and I couldn't go any faster. I doubled up as much as possible, taking Bio I in 9th grade, Bio II and Chem I in 10th, Chem II and Physics I as a junior, and Physics II as a senior, which was the best I could do. My junior year I also stumbled across the book Spacetime Physics in the library, by Taylor and Wheeler.

(Aside: the second edition of that book is apparently available as a free download!)

I took the book to my physics teacher and arranged to meet him after class to talk about special relativity, which was as far as I got before getting really confused. But while I was eager to dive in, he didn't care at all and didn't find it the subject either interesting or worth the extra time. I was seriously disappointed.

That was my first encounter with someone who understood more than I did, yet somehow failed to find joy or beauty in it. To that point in school I always thought that the reason people didn't like the things I liked learning, whether it be physics or literature or history, was because they didn't understand it the way I did. If they could see what I was seeing, they'd love it too, or so I thought. I was amazed to find that wasn't the case.

More to my surprise, my plan to be an astrophysicist also didn't sit well with my family, either. My father wanted me to go into engineering, because it was much more likely I could find a job that way. My mother's parents were also concerned that I'd be an unemployed astronomer.

Besides, physicists apparently were weird. The most surprising response came from my great-grandmother (yes, great-grandmother -- we briefly had five living generations on my mother's side, but that's a story for another time). She helped run a grocery store back in the 30s in the Washington, DC area and actually met Albert Einstein when he came in to buy something. She looked at his unruly hair, somewhat distracted look, and absent-minded tendencies and was less than impressed. She waved away my awe at her brush with greatness.

"You don't want to be like that," she said, and yet I so, so did.

Early in my junior year, I started receiving flyers for various colleges. I'd pretty much nuked the PSATs (the preliminary version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test you took in 10th grade -- I wasn't scheduled to take the actual SATs until the following spring), so colleges started sending me stuff. One day my father called me over about a mailer from Harvard summer school for high school students and asked me if I wanted to go.

I was astonished, because I hadn't thought that was any kind of possibility. Of course I wanted to go. My father's idea was that a kid from a small public high school in York, PA was going to have a hard time impressing Ivy League colleges, but doing well at a summer session at Harvard might make a big difference. Back in those days (this was for the summer of 1979), there wasn't a whole industry dedicated to getting kids into elite schools, at least not like today. I guess my father was ahead of the curve on that.

I applied, got my teachers to write recommendations, and waited. I was thrilled to get in. I have no idea what the actual acceptance rate was, though I'm sure it was much higher than the actual college.

(Sorry, self-deprecation is still a habit. "I got in, so how hard could it have been?" I still automatically think that, discounting that there were probably a lot of other parents thinking the same thing as my father. Looking back on the experience, I'm also keenly aware of my own privilege in being able to apply and go, but I shouldn't let that detract from the actual accomplishment. It's hard not to minimize it, though.)

I signed up for the only two astronomy courses they offered that didn't require calculus. One was called The Solar System and focused on the Sun and the planets, and the other was called Astrophysics and the Universe, and was a survey course about all the things I wanted to know. from the Big Bang to black holes and everything in between. I couldn't wait to go, though spending eight weeks away from home for the first time was rather daunting.

As it turned out, I loved those courses. I can no longer remember the professor's name (he was an adjunct back before that was normal, too, so I don't think he was there very long), but he was a roly-poly of a man with wild, red hair and a beard that made him look like Santa Claus on vacation. Among his talents was the ability to draw a perfect ellipse on a blackboard every time. I was suitably impressed.

I talked to him after class about doing a side project involving plotting the orbit of Mars based only on observations of its location in the sky. He worked out the formulas and I went to the astronomy library and dug out the ephemerides, containing locations in the sky for Mars for a whole year (that's Martian year -- 687 days) and plugged them in one by one into his formula and plotted the results on graph paper. I messed it up, too, but he was impressed by the effort. I expect that nowadays that entire project could now be done online in an hour or less, but at the time I kept imagining myself as one of the classic astronomers like Tycho Brahe doing everything by hand. It was awesome until it got boring, which is probably where my mistakes started creeping in. No matter -- he liked it and I had fun overall.

I easily earned A's in both courses. That turned out to be rather misleading -- I thought all of college was going to be like that, meaning all I had to do was spend the time and I would be a star (no pun intended). Arguably what I'd actually done was to ace a couple of "physics for poets" courses, but I thought I was pretty hot stuff anyway.

(Sorry -- minimizing again. But I really did get a misleading impression of how difficult college would be from that.)

I had other significant experiences that summer as well -- like seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theater for the first time, going to my first Red Sox game, and I even met a girl -- but I'll save those stories for another time. Of course I loved the whole Cambridge area, and Boston is an amazing place to be a college student, even an underage one like I was, and I couldn't wait to return "for real".

Back in high school, I waited out my senior year. I was taking Physics II and Calculus, but the former had that unenthusiastic teacher and the latter was taught by a woman (Miss Snell, who I can picture clearly to this day) who was roughly a thousand years old at the time and whose preferred teaching style was to scream at us.

Seriously. She yelled in anticipation of students making mistakes, and then she yelled when they did. Most of us learned to tune it out pretty quickly, but in retrospect it's hard to believe she got away with that kind of abuse for so long. I know some of my friends suffered as a result, and did much worse than they otherwise would have. To add to what nowadays would be considered malpractice, at the end of each marking period she re-seated all of us in order of how well we were doing in the class, from the best in the front left corner of the room to the worst in the back right. Nothing like publicly demonstrating to every student where they and everyone else fell in the pecking order to damage your confidence.

Unless you were me, of course. All of that played to my strengths. I was in the front left corner, which already made me one of her favorites. I also knew how to handle being yelled at (for unspecified family reasons I won't get into now). Plus being good at the Game of School helped. For example, she highly valued the "turn the crank" kinds of problems, meaning once I figured out what she was asking, I could show all the steps exactly the way she wanted to see them, regardless of how much I understood the underlying math. She may have been nasty, but at least she was predictable. She also wrote me a recommendation when it came time to apply for colleges again.

I applied to Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania (everyone's "back up" Ivy school in my area), Bucknell, and that little technical school also located in Cambridge, MA known as MIT. My SAT scores were strong but disappointing -- not nearly as high as I expected, but hopefully high enough -- and I did an interview for all of the schools.

(For the record, the first time I took the SATs I got 670 Verbal / 680 Math. I read up on geometry before taking them again and got 670 Verbal / 730 Math, which was at least respectable. In my dorm at MIT, I had the lowest math score on my floor. Heck, the other two members of my triple first term freshman year scored 780 and a perfect 800.)

The Bucknell interview was fun, because the interviewer looked at my Harvard summer school transcript and said, "Wait, you mean THE Harvard?" so I knew I was in at that point. The Princeton interview was done by a family friend (there's that privilege again, but so be it), and was pleasant enough but not really notable.

The Harvard interview was a disaster. It was done by a Harvard lawyer at his downtown York office, and of everyone I'd met, he was the least impressed with my Harvard grades. "We expect everyone who gets in to be able to do that," he said. He noticed that I wasn't first in my class and asked about it, and when I told him about two of the people ahead of me, he wanted to talk about them instead. It was a miserable experience.

(I got a few B's my first term in 9th grade, then never another one after that. When you're competing with others at the top, however, that's all it takes. We had two students who finished with straight A's. I think in the end I ranked as low as 7th out of about 235. When most of the academic awards given out at graduation were based exclusively on grades, I missed out and was quite angry about it, but there was nothing I could do.)

My MIT interview, by contrast, was great. My interviewer was a woman who had a math degree, and when I told her about my attempt to trisect an angle (I drew a line connecting equidistant points on the two legs and trisected the line, then drew lines from the vertex to those points -- which you can do, but unfortunately the resulting angles aren't actually equal -- as my math teacher told me, try it with an obtuse angle and it's obvious), she laughed and tried to explain why using group theory you could prove that was actually impossible. We would up talking about books on her bookshelf and other academic topics. I had a lot of fun.

When I visited Princeton, I discovered that Wheeler (co-author of that Spacetime Physics book mentioned above) was actually a professor there. "Wow!" I said. "You've got to let me in here!" They liked my enthusiasm, but wouldn't make any promises.

The plan, therefore, was that if I got into Princeton, I was going to major in physics, but if I went to MIT, I would go into engineering, whatever that was. I'd already written off Harvard. I'd already gotten into Penn in early admission, but I didn't expect to be "stuck" going there.

(The arrogance is staggering, but I was only 17 at the time.)

In the end, there wasn't a decision to make. Harvard said no, and so did Princeton. When MIT said yes, that became the place to go. Since I still had little enthusiasm for engineering (again, having no idea what it was, but it sounded too practical to be appealing), my father suggested computers as an alternative. That sounded reasonable, though again I had no idea what that really meant either. That became the new goal, however, as I entered as a first term freshman.

That's plenty for this week. I'll pick up the story in the next newsletter.

This week:

• Spring and Spring Boot online at Safari

• Dallas NFJS event, which was a lot of fun

• Worked on the books Managing Your Manager and Kotlin Cookbook over the holiday

Next week:

• Reactive Spring online at Safari

• What's New In Java online at Safari

• Kotlin for Android online at Safari