Trading One Love for Another

I went to Syracuse “undecided.”  When I was in high school, my father asked what I was going to study in college, and I said I wanted to study business.  And he said, “Well, if you're going to study business, you're not going to go to college. You can come work for me.”  I immediately said “I want to be a lawyer,” so that I could go to college.  I was accepted into the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse, which a lot of “undecided” people attended.


Between my freshman and sophomore years, I was seeing a girl back home who was going to take some summer classes at a local community college. I wanted to be with her, so I decided to take a class, too.  I took a computer programming class in a language called COBOL - and I loved it. You set down the time, you set down the  You sat down in front of a typewriter terminal, you typed in these commands and the computer would digest the commands and spit out the results. I thought it was great.


That’s when I got the inkling that computers could help business do what it's supposed to do.  They could help us understand who our customers are, or how much inventory we have, and I could make the computer answer those questions.  That was really rewarding. Plus, I really enjoyed the immediate feedback I got from writing the program.


I went back to Syracuse for my sophomore year and enrolled in at the College of Engineering and Computer and Information Science to get a degree in computer Systems and Information Science.science.  At the time, they actually offered two degrees. One was in hardcore Computer Science, and the other was in something called Systems and Information Science, which was more applied - it was more about how to use the computer as opposed to how you make the computer do what it does. I decided to go for that.


So I went in to computer science because I wanted to be with this girl over that summer.  That led to taking a class in COBOL programming, and that turned me on. I kept going with computer science but after that summer I stopped seeing that girl.  I traded one love for another.

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The Best of The Rest

When I was a junior in high school, I took the SATs and I went to my guidance counselor for advice about where to go to college.  He recommended a list of schools that I might be interested in. I was the first member of my family to go to college, so my family didn't have a whole lot of experience selecting one. So I set off to visit some of the schools on my own.


I went to George Washington University down in Washington, DC, and while it's a decent school, there is no campus, which at the time was very important to me. I went to Carnegie Mellon out in Pittsburgh, which has a campus, but it was all engineering, and at that time I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I looked at a couple of schools in New Jersey but I wanted to be farther away from home so I didn't go near them. I think I looked at Rockhurst Rutgers and Drew University, but I also rejected those because they were too close to home.


Then some friends and I decided to go on a road trip to visit schools. One of the schools we ended up at was on my list - Syracuse University.  It was a beautiful day in April, sunny and warm, everybody was out on the quad, there was music and it seemed like a great place to be.  So, based on the fact that my guidance counselor said it was a decent place to go, and it had a campus, and it was far enough away from home, and I happened to see it on this beautiful, wonderful day, I decided to go to Syracuse University.  I later learned that was the only nice day they had that spring, but that was okay.  I learned how to deal with the weather  when I got there.


Early on, the thing that I found comforting about Syracuse is that there was a community for everybody. No matter what you were interested in, no matter what you wanted to study or play - it seemed like there was always a group of people that you could hook up with who were also interested.  Even in my first couple of days there, I met a whole bunch of people from different parts of the campus, and I'm not sure what it was that we had in common, but it was something. This sense of community was a great help in my transition into the university.


That’s how I ended up at Syracuse.  It was the right combination of a great school with a beautiful campus whose charm captured me from the first day.

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