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.