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CAREER
Written early/mid 1990s
Rev: March 26, 2018
About time I decided what my next move is right?
Let's doomify past decisions in my life,
and some of my possible options for the future.
Maybe I'll come up with something...
There's the "King of Hearts" papers
somewhere that could be typed in.
That's a major one, so let's start there:
One night, when I was around 17, I was
doing the long walk back from downtown
Huntington after seeing the "King of Hearts"
at the "New Community Cinema"...
For reasons I couldn't explain well, that
was the time I picked to think about Life.
TAKEN_LIGHTLY
I remember considering various altruistic things
like joining the peace corp. Going where things are
bad, trying to make them work better.
But actually, this could be a kind of simple-minded
approach. Technological advances were more likely to
solve those sort of problems long before the Peace Corp
could make much of a dent in them.
So I started thinking more about going the "hard sciences"
route. Engineering/physics, whatever.
I was thinking about the possibilities for
things like Space Industrialization, sometimes
called the Third Industrial Revolution in those
days.
Previously I'd thought of myself as a Science Fiction
writer, if anything. But if I didn't make it as a
techie, clearly I could always fall back on the idea
of being a writer.
So my grades took a sudden upswing from the 11th grade on,
And on that basis I made it into SUNY Stony Brook...
Where I did fairly well... winding up as a Mechanical Engineer
after wavering between other ideas (Electrical Engineering,
Physics).
My math probably wasn't good enough back then,
but oddly enough that's not the reason
I dropped ideas like physics.
I think the reason I picked engineering over
science was that I thought of it as a choice
between doing things and understanding
things. I wanted to do both, but it seemed
more likely I'd make more money as an
engineer, so I might as well let that decide it.
Also, the College of Arts and Sciences requred
some Foreign Language credits. The College of
Engineering didn't. There were some other
things I thought saner about the distribution
requirements: Engineers were encouraged to take
a sequence in some non-techy field as a sort of
baby minor (I picked economics, as many
engineers did). The scientists, on the other
hand were encouraged to take more stuff
scattered around in different fields.
ME over EE was a choice made on the basis
of the idea that as a EE I'd more likely
wind up working on some small subsystems,
while MEs seemed to have a better shot at (One might Innumerate the
over all designs. misconceptions here, but this
is long enough already.)
I concentrated on Fluids Mechanics courses, on the
theory that I would get hired by Grumman, gradually
work my way up through the company and edge into
the "space" side of aerospace.
I also took a lot of math electives, despite the
fact that I was getting weak grades in them, on
the misguided theory that college was a place
where you were supposed to try to learn things.
Another decision: work first, or grad school? I liked
the idea of learning something about industry before
continuing on in school. The argument that I'd get
addicted to money and never go back to school didn't (I never have
impress me. I was determined/ weird enough to do it. experienced that
I didn't apply to any grad schools. "addicted to
money". I'm
I graduated into a recession: six months earlier, always ready to
engineers were getting a half dozen offers each. quit and go back
I wound up with only one I would even consider: to "poverty mode"
The Advanced Projects Group of the Expended Core if need be: I
Facility at the Naval Reactor Facility run by have no expensive
Westinghouse at the Idaho National Engineering Lab tastes. Or major
site. responsibilities
like children.)
This required a major move on my part.
Amazingly enough, my girl friend
decided to follow me out there (where
she expected to be miserable, and met
her expectations). The plan was I
would only be there for a few years,
after which I'd try to get another
company to move me back east, and then
I'd start thinking about grad school.
After Westinghouse: Two years were up. Time to change jobs.
I didn't come up with an offer from an East Coast company
(but then, maybe I didn't work that hard at it).
I decided to quit, and do the move on my own,
and work out what I wanted to do later.
Then *after* I'd move back, my girl friend broke up with me.
Around that time I settled on going to
graduate school, but I'd screwed up on
the deadlines for a number of places I
was interested in.
I could have gone to RPI. (which has a
reasonable deadline), but I decided to sit Actually, I was working
out a year, during which I did very little on a programming project,
of consequence... a database in Turbo
Pascal using MSDOS system
I did a number of major road trips calls.
around the country, exploring
different places I might want to live I also did a lot of
(I learned I didn't want to be in LA, rock climbing trips
which was perhaps worth the investment up to the 'gunks.
in time itself.)
That summer I took an engineering job
at Space Structures Incorporated,
and after that I did some temp work at a bank.
Anyway, back to decisions: should I continue with ME,
perhaps in robotics? Should I try to switch to EE and
digital electronics (which I'd done some studying in
at Idaho State University)? Or should I switch to
something like Materials Science?
Still thinking about Space Industrialization, I reasoned that
there were plenty of AeroAstro majors around working on
methods of reaching orbit. The Space Shuttle was flying,
and it was expensive, but you might hope the cost would come
down, over time. The thing that was really needed was
a "driver", a product that could only be made in space that
would increase demand for access to orbit, bring down prices
further, and so on...
I knew vaugely about some successes in experiments with
microgravity crystal growth, so that was high on my list.
I also considered some other things, like research into
Extractive Metallurgy, to figure out ways of turning something
like lunar dust into something worthwhile.
I was turned down by MIT but got accepted into the half dozen other
grad schools I'd applied to. Three of them were in California --
I liked the idea of moving to CA because of the proximity of
(a) mountains, (b) ocean (c) urban areas. (This is fairly unique
in the US). I was offered fellowships by U.C.L.A. and Berkeley,
but I'd had enough of big state schools, so I went with
Stanford, to study Xtal growth.
Somewhat ironically, I was put to work on mixing techinques:
the exact opposite of what had attracted me to Xtal growth.
(Another odd note: as of May 92, it looks like a hot topic
is _High_ Gravity Crystallization...)
And then there's the third phase I'm in right now.
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