My university experience was very liberal arts. Not liberal art as in a philosophy major but liberal arts as in no particular thought of future employment. I started out as a math major and added physics when my advisor coincidentally noticed I was on track course-wise early in my junior year. In my senior year I added a computer science minor when that same advisor noticed I was just a few credits short for that. Where would that all lead? No clue.
Why a math major anyway? I certainly had an affinity for math but, probably more importantly, the three most impactful teachers in all of my schooling were math teachers.
Grade school, Sister John Clare. My report cards through grade school were a mix of A’s and B’s with some “could try harder”s thrown in. Not sure I ever got a C.
That changed in sixth grade. Don’t know what is covered in sixth grade math (and, by the looks of it, I may never know) but I opted out. Didn’t pay attention in class, didn’t do the assignments, didn’t study for the tests. Sister John Clare could have cut me some slack and let me slide by with a C. Many teachers would have. But she didn’t. I got a D. I’ve always suspected that if she had given me a C I might very well have continued this into seventh grade. Instead the D was the wakeup call. I redoubled my efforts to make sure it would never happen again.
High school, Mr. Glyzewski. Through some quirk I had the same teacher, Mr. Glyzewski, for all but one of my high school math classes. The one exception was Geometry which was taught by the wrestling coach but that’s a story for another day.
Mr. Glyzewski was unspectacular in most regards. Nothing would jump out at you if you had passed him on the street or even if you had walked past his classroom as he was teaching. But he had one singular superpower, a preternatural expectation of success for all his students. And, often by sheer willpower on his part, he achieved it. From the valedictorian to kids that would eventually drop out, everyone learned math in his class. He left me with a strong “I can do this” confidence when it came to math.
University, Dr. Wilcox. He was a ski bum teaching in the flattest part of one of the flattest states in the U.S. But that wasn’t his only anomaly. All his Dr. Wilcox’s tests were open book / open notebook. He wasn’t interested if you could memorize a formula and apply it reach the answer; he was interested if you could understand the backstory of why it was important and the theoretical work that led to solving the problem. If you didn’t do well on a given test he’d set aside an office hour and you’d walk through it together. He was obsessed with the beauty of math.
Where Sister John Clare motivated me, Mr. Glyzewski empowered me, Dr. Wilcox enthralled me. And with that came the push out the door.
What do you do with a math major anyway? My last semester at university and I still had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I never had an internship, all my college jobs had all been factory jobs. (Fun fact: I earned more at my last factory job than I would earn in my first white color job. Thank you Brewery Workers Local Union Number 9!)
My college interviews opened up four possibilities. The first was with an actuarial firm. I ruled it out because the boss that interviewed me had an office with a fluorescent light that hummed. Loud enough that I can close my eyes and still hear it today. The second was a hardware job for a company that manufactured security equipment. It piqued my interest but it turns out they were quite a bit less enamored with me. (Fun fact: when I called the guy to ask him about an offer because I had two others pending, he paused and then replied “Jim, take one of those other jobs.”)
That left two. One was a COBOL application programming position for an insurance company. The other was writing utilities in assembler to support the programming staff at a manufacturing company.
Maybe I would have found my niche if I had taken the COBOL job but I suspect it would’ve been a long and winding road. Instead, I was able to parlay the assembler I learned (assembler being the language for most software companies at that time) and the smattering of IBM internals I picked up to get my first job as a programmer for a software company. And with that I stayed in software for the rest of my professional career.
Why did I take the assembler job? The offer was $250 higher than the COBOL job.
