Why I went to college, Part 1 of 3

As the middle child, I have a slight rebellious streak. Maybe it stems from the need to grab some attention away from my perfect older brother and "the baby" - my brother Bruce. But when it came to important decisions, I certainly listened to my parents. I didn't always take their advice or do what they said but I did listen.

One such life-altering decision was where to go to college and what to major in. There was never a discussion about whether I should attend college. It was just what you did. At the time (this was in 1969), I had spent several years learning about computer programming and I loved it. But my Dad told me that it wasn't a good choice because within "five years" computers would be writing their own code and it would be a dead-end job. I believed my Dad and fell back on my second love, chemistry.

I had a full-blown lab in my basement and I specialized in explosives. I'd regularly come running upstairs, right around dinner time, slam the door shut and tell everybody to stay out. There was one time that I accidentally sat in a small puddle of sulfuric acid and it ate away the seat of my jeans and my underwear. Nobody noticed for a while but finally I said, it seemed drafty and that's when my Mom discovered my butt cheeks hanging out.

Anyway, chemistry it was so I applied to several schools, got into the University of Michigan and started down the road to become a chemical engineer. The problem was, it was boring. All they ever did was make you read books about reactions instead of witnessing them before your eyes. I could tell the number of carbon atoms in a polymer string just by sniffing them or guess a compound just by looking at it but that was all taken away from me.

After two years of this torture, I threw in the towel and switched from a hard science, chemistry, to the softest of sciences, psychology. It was a breeze and far more interesting and I got a B.S. in Psychology which felt good. Rolling back to my freshman year, I got a part time job which became full-time in the summer, because I wanted to stay on campus to be near a girl. Unfortunately, she changed her mind at the last second and left for the summer but I stayed and had an awesome time.

Tomorrow, I will explain how my job "mutated" and I started drifting toward computer programming as a living.