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CAREER
Written early/mid 1990s
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.
One night, when I was around 17,
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.
I remember considering various altruistic things
like joining the peace core. Going where things are
bad, trying to make them work better.
But actually, that was a kind of simpleminded approach,
correct? Technological advances were more likely to solve
those sort of problems long before the Peace Core could
make much of a dent in them.
So I started thinking more about going the "hard sciences"
route. Engineering/physics, whatever. I think I wanted
to work on Space Industrialization, the Third Industrial
Revolution.
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 dropping ideas such as being a physicist or an EE.
My math probably wasn't good enough 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 minor 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 over all designs.
(Innumerate the misconceptions here?)
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 impress me. I was determined/
weird enough to do it. I didn't apply to any grad schools.
I graduated into a recession: six months earlier, engineers were
getting a half dozen offers each. I wound up with only one I
would even consider: The Advanced Projects Group of the
Expended Core Facility at the Naval Reactor Facility run by
Westinghouse at the Idaho National Engineering Lab site.
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)
I told myself 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, I don't think I worked very hard at it.
I decided to quit, and do the move on my own,
and work out what I wanted to do later.
My girl friend broke up with me at that point. My efforts
at finding a job weren't working out. I screwed up on
graduate school deadlines. I couldn have gone to
R.P.I. (which has a reasonable deadline), but I decided to
sit out a year, during which I did very little of
consequence.. Eventually I did some work for Space
Structures Incorporated. I also did some temp work in a
bank. There were also some major road trips around the
country.
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 opposition 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 stuck in right now.
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