Why I went to college, Part 2 of 3

Yesterday, I explained to you why I decided to enter college as a chemistry major but got a part time job on campus so I could stick around in the summer. I was hired as an assistant to a psychiatrist who was trying to determine the success of treatment during their stay at the University of Michigan Hospital Neuropsychiatric Institute or NPI as it was known at the time. My job was to interview discharged patients to see how they were doing. I was diligent and interviewed a bunch of patients and filled out questionnaires which built up in a pile in the corner. When I finally asked my boss what she was going to do with the questionnaires, she told me she didn't know. I offered to arrange for them to get rendered into punch cards which helped out a lot.

When that was done, we had a boxes and boxes of punch cards in the corner and I asked my boss what she was going to do with those. She said she didn't know. I offered to write some software to read in the punch cards and put them in a database. She said that was a good idea so I did.

At this point, we had a database and, you guessed it, when I asked my boss what she was going to do with it, she said she didn't know. I offered to write code to analyze the cards and give her some statistics which she thought was a good idea. By this point, my job title (and paycheck!) had changed and now I was a junior programmer. I stuck with that job and the programming and when I graduated the college, I now had formal training in all elements of using a computer to help analyze science.

Once I was graduated, there was no putting it off. I had to do something but I wasn't really interested in working so I decided to go to graduate school to get a Ph.D. I selected Syracuse University because they paid the most. But I went into the neurosciences program instead of computer science because my Dad's words were still ringing in my ears. Within a year or two, computers would be writing their own code and it would be a waste of my time.

I spent the next five years cutting open animals, vibrating arms, testing vision, taction and hearing. I programmed computers to apply stimuli and record and analyze the results. I was the first graduate student to write his own thesis on a computer instead of hiring a typist. By the time I was done, I had a Ph.D. in Sensory Sciences with a minor in Computer Science. It didn't look like computers would be writing their own code in the next year or two (this was 1980 now) but I played it safe.

Well, the time had come. I couldn't put it off any longer. I had to go out into the world and get a job. Well, maybe I could put it off a little longer. More on that tomorrow.