I got my mail, and there was a letter with the return address of Digital Equiment Corporation, in Nashua, NH. It was a thick envelope, which was different than most of the letters I received from companies I had interviewed with.

Dear Mr. _____,

After your on-campus interview with our representative, we would like to extend to you an invitaion to participate in our onsite interview process, which will take place at our Nashua campus, March __-__, 1987. Please find enclosed our information about how to make travel arrangements…

OMG. I could hardly believe it…

But I wasn’t graduating.

If you have any questions or concerns, please call Ms. Jane Smith at ___-___-____, M-F, 10-5 Eastern time. Looking forward to seeing you in March.

I knew that interview went well!

But I still wasn’t graduating.

The next day, I called Ms. Smith, and talked to her. I said I had received the invitation, but due to illness and other unexpected circumstances, I was going to graduate a semester late. She said, “Well, we may not do this hiring fair next year. Up to you.”

“I’ll guess I’ll have to decline.”

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I should have gone. I found out later that if a company wants you, they are often willing to set your hiring date much later, or make other accommodations (like letting me finish my degree in the Boston area), or whatever. At the very least, I should have gone to get interviewing practice.

I also found out later that at least two of my classmates in my Compiler Construction class got offers and went to work there. It was truly a great class.

My life would’ve been much different had I moved to the Nashua/Boston area in 1987. But I did learn some lessons from the entire experience, and at the very least, got a big confidence boost that a company was actually interested in me. I needed that after the depression that set in after I withdrew from school and punted a semester. My spirits were so much better, and as a result, school was easier.

This should be the last post about college coursework. However, it was the most important course I took as part of my Computer Science degree at Rice.

The first exposure to algorithms and data structures at Rice was in a course called Advanced Programming. (I would have written a post about how awful that course was, but I’ve already written about a course that was much worse). 90% of that course was doing “team programming”, and the rest was an introduction to data structures and algorithms. One of the reasons I did so poorly in that course was the “team programming” was only 60% of the grade.

I had also not done particularly well in COMP 481 Automata and Formal Languages, which is the mentally most challenging course I ever attempted. I took it once from Hans Boehm, who I mentioned in this post, and dropped it. And then I took it from the late Michael Perlman, and almost failed.

I did much better in the hands-on-keyboard, programming work, than I did in the theory work.

Algorithms is a theory course. An algorithm is a way to solve a problem. They have all kinds of characteristics, and many ways to measure them. A good use of an algorithm can mean the difference between a website handling lots of traffic, or crashing.

I took this course from Dr. Robert Hood. He was great. Friendly, approachable, and understandable. As was typical, I got behind almost immediately, and struggled with the work the first 3 or 4 weeks.

The fourth week, one of our homework problems was a problem called The Stable Marriage Problem. We had to come up with an algorithm to come up with solutions for the problem. (And we did not yet have the Internet to help us.)

I sat in my apartment with TV dinners, lots of Dr. Pepper, and a radio, and spent 2.5 days doing nothing but work on this problem. But I finally had an “aha” moment. I figured out a solution in my mind Sunday around lunch, and spent the rest of the day writing it down and refining it.

When I got to school on Monday, I started talking with some friends. We decided to form a study group. It may seem obvious, but I had not really been part of a study group before, except for the one that formed around a woman I dated when I took Differential Equations.

I really started digging the course. I thoroughly enjoyed the material, and the three of us in our study group kicked butt and took no prisoners.

This should have been my last semester, but I had to withdraw from school the previous semester, so I had one more semester left. However, a lot of my friends were graduating. Rice had a thing whereby graduating senior finals had to be completed a week earlier than the rest of the finals so that final grades could be calculated and diplomas printed. The final for 482 was on the last day of senior finals, and it was my last final, and all of my friends were partying afterwards. I was really motivated to finish the final and get out of there.

I started the final, and breezed through the first 9 questions. 10 and 11 had some meat to them, and some proofs, so they took me a few minutes each. At 1:00 into the 3 hour final, I had one problem left.

Some poor woman turned hers in around this time. She looked like she was about to break down and sob; she evidently had not done well.

I looked at the last problem, and it was a classic “prove this problem is really really hard when there are lots of inputs” problem. The thing is, if you can prove that one of those can be transformed to a different one that you know is already “hard”, you are done. There was a note on the white board though:

“On problem #12, I am willing to give you a hint for a 5 point penalty on the grade for the test.”

I looked outside. It was a beautiful day. I knew that the parties were already starting. I could hear the music blaring out of Radio Free Sid (a high-rise dorm on campus) through the walls. I was done.

I walked up to Dr. Hood, and whispered, “I would like the hint, please?” He looked startled, and said, “Really? Are you sure?” I said, “Please.”

The hint was what known problem to transform it to. That made it easy; about 10 minutes later I turned in the test, and left to party with my friends. The 3-hour final had taken about 1:20.

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I went by Dr. Hood’s office a couple of weeks later to pick up the test. I got an 88 out of 100, after the penalty was accessed. Dr. Hood asked me, “So, what on Earth made you ask for the hint? Without the penalty, you made one of the highest five scores on this test out of the entire class. Even with it, you are in the top 10…”

I said, “Dr. Hood, I was done. I was supposed to graduate this semester, and I am somewhat burned out. I wanted out of there, and I figured I had done well enough to absorb the penalty in return for freedom.”

He laughed. He the put his elbows on his desk, put his hands together in a triangle, and said, “So, what are you going to do when you are finished with your bachelor’s?”

“Oh, I’m going into industry.”

“Have you thought about grad school?” He looked thoughtful, and he looked at me like he was appraising me for something.

“You’ve seen my grades. I don’t think anybody would take me.”

He put his hands down, and said, earnestly, “I would take you. You could get your Ph. D. at Rice.”

I was speechless, and almost ready to cry. He continued.

“You showed me what you are able to do this this semester. You started slow, but came on very strong. And, as I said, you made one of the best grades on the final. And I talked with Hans about you; he said you had grown up between the two courses you took from him. We think you could do well. You would have to do well on the GRE. You would have to retake all of the computer science courses you made D’s in. So it would take you a little longer.”

I sat up straighter and looked him in the eye. “Thank you so much for the invitation. This is the nicest thing anybody has said to me about my career here at Rice. I am honored.

“That being said, I have one more semester for my degree. It will be my 11th semester. Spending 3-5 more years at school I think would make me absolutely crazy. And I am hoping to get out of Houston. So I think I am going to have to decline. But, thank you so much.”

“Well, if you change your mind, give me a call.”

---

He’s not a professor anymore, so I can’t play that card now. Still, it was very nice.

Oh, and as for Algorithms, it is the cornerstone of Computer Science. It is also the basis of all modern interview processes at most big companies, like Amazon, Google, or Facebook. Anybody wanting a good programming position should know this material cold. I am thankful every day at work that I took this course and did well in it.

There I was around Thanksgiving – I had just withdrawn and flushed the first semester of my senior year down the toilet. I was always pretty broke; I had been in college, after all, so I needed some kind of job.

I had worked the previous summer doing data entry for an airplane broker, entering information on giant cards full of data about Lear Jets, Windsongs, and Cessna Citations into a database. I knew that they had not finished that project yet, so I called my old boss there to see if I could do a few weeks of work. No dice.

Two friends of mine had been tapped on the shoulder that summer to work for a startup in Houston doing Apple II software. StyleWare was formed somewhere around 1984 or 1985 by two current Rice students and a fellow they had worked with one summer. They wrote Multiscribe (a word processor that looked very much like MacWrite for the original Mac) for the Apple II, and sold it with 1-800 phones lines in their dorm rooms. It was a success.

Apple shipped the Apple II GS in the fall of 1986, and they asked StyleWare to port and upgrade Multiscribe for the Apple IIGS. Apple also wanted StyleWare to do some kind of graphics program, and StyleWare hired my two friends to work on it, which is how I found out about it.

When I ended up on the street, I called StyleWare to do any job they had available. Turns out they had just fired their customer support representative. So, for the last six weeks of December, I answered phones and took orders at StyleWare. It would not be the last time I worked for them.

Oh, and I applied for re-admission as soon as I found out that my withdrawal from Rice was final. The beginning of the second week of December, I got a letter for Rice stating that my application for re-admission had been granted.

Whew. Maybe my life was going to be worth something after all.

 

First day of school:

MASC 451 – Numerical Analysis

(in heavy Italian accent) Welcome to Numerical Analysis. My name is Guido Contini. I got off the plane yesterday. They tell me grade inflation is a thing in America; I do not participate in that. In Italy, half of the students in a class fail. Hopefully, you are are smarter than that, but we will have to see..

… and of course, there was no book, only lecture notes.

RUSS 101 – Introduction to Russian

“You should be able to read the Russian alphabet by Friday, and turn in your homework in cursive Cyrillic by the middle of next week…”

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Second week of school:

COMP 421 Operating Systems

“Your second assignment: Design a file system. Be specific. Due in two weeks.”

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Fourth week of school:

Grade of first MASC 451 test: 3 out of 10

Grade of first STAT 382 test: 45 out of 100 (mean 55)

Grade of COMP 421 file system: 30 out of 100 or so

RUSS 101 (Introduction to Russian) first test: 65 out of 100 (mean is 80)

HIST 211 – no grades yet, but I read the entire text book first two days of class. Love this class.

Not looking good so far.

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Fifth week of school:

Dropped COMP 421.

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Sixth week of school:

“Hi. This is your mom. Doctor says I have to have a hysterictomy. I will be going to Methodist on Monday. The surgery is Tuesday, and they estimate I will get to go home Saturday. I need you to take me to the hospital, run errands for me, and sit with me.”

“Mom, I have mid-terms. I can’t just take a week off.”

“Oh, Honey, I am sure you can study while I am sleeping. And you can certainly go to your classes. Besides, while I am in the hospital, you can use my car.”

“Mom, I don’t have anywhere to go. I have to study.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

She did not actually sleep that much after surgery. I got almost no studying done.

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Eighth week of school:

I rode my bike every morning from my off-campus apartment. I rode on from southwest campus, entered at Stockton, rode through the stadium lot, and got on the road going east-west through the middle of campus. These days, it’s one way going west, but it was two-way while I was there.

As I approached the Rice Memorial Center on my right, I noticed that there was a car parked on the street in front of it. And a shuttle bus was coming the other direction. I slowed down a little, waiting for the bus to pass, and then sped up to go around the car.

That’s when the driver opened her door.

The fortunate thing is that I did not ram the door with my front wheel, thus avoiding hitting her, and a lot more damage. I still hooked my handlebar, though. I distincly remember looking out and seeing a clear blue morning sky, with the Sun at my feet, right before I hit the ground, flat on my back, my backpack taking the brunt of the fall. My toeclips were still engaged, so when I stopped sliding on the ground, my bike fell to the right and twisted my back. When everything stopped moving, my back hurt, my leg was scraped, and my glasses were missing.

The driver came up to me, looking concerned, and said, “Are you OK?”

“No. I don’t know. I might be.”

She then ran back to her car, got in, and drove off.

A couple of minutes later, somebody found me, and helped me disentangle myself, and I assessed the damage. My backpack was shredded. My calculator in the backpack was in pieces. My Civil War text book was shredded.

My glasses, which were 15 feet away, were bent. The deraileur on my bike was smashed into the spokes, and the front wheel had a big place where it was no longer true. The right brake lever was not where it was supposed to me.

My right hand hurt. My back hurt enough to make it hard for me to walk. I was shaking with adrenaline and anger.

Nobody caught her.

The upshot was: No bike for three weeks, and a $200 repair. New $75 calculator. New $20 backpack. New $45 civil war text book. $150 for new glasses.

This meant that my 15 minute bike ride to school turned into an hour walk. I started being late and missing morning classes, as I was also having trouble with asthma. It took a week for my back to straighten out.

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Ninth week of school:

Mid-term grade for MASC 451: 0 out of 10. I talked to Guido about it, and he said he did not believe in partial credit. So I was out of luck.

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Tenth week of school (drop-deadline week):

The woman I was dating had already graduated, said “Yes” when the other guy proposed, and was moving to Washington, DC, to take her new job. I helped pack her truck, and she said goodbye. When she told me about the proposal, I dropped to my knee, and asked her to marry me instead, but, at that time, it was not meant to be… I was absolutely devastated as she drove away on Monday morning.

Tuesday morning I woke up sick. Sick. Sick. I had the flu. By Friday, my father had to drive in from Northwest Houston to deliver food to me (though, I really wasn’t hungry). I could got get the energy to go to campus and drop MASC 451. I was in really bad shape.

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Twelfth week of school:

I had a meeting with the Dean of Students. I told him that I thought I needed to withdraw from school, and come back the next semester. We talked about everything I had been through. He told me to let him talk to my professors, and assess where I was.

Two days later, we met again. He said, “Let’s develop some target grades for upcoming projects and tests that if you make, you can finish the semester.”

I studied really hard.

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Fourteenth week of school:

The dean said, “Well, I got your grades back from your latest assignments.”

I said, “Yes?”

He said, “I think you need to withdraw from school.”

I slumped, but was also instantly relieved.

He continued.

“You actually did remarkably well; you even showed vast improvement in MASC 451. But I don’t think you would avoid academic probation if you finished out the semester.”

I said, “Well, isn’t it true that my grades when I withdraw could also qualify me for probation?”

He said, “That’s for the committee to decide. And I am the chairman. To me, you have shown me enough that when you re-apply for next semester, I will recommend you be taken back in.”

“Thanks so much, Dean. You have done a lot for me.”

“You have a done a lot for yourself. Good luck to you. I’ll keep my eye on you as you go forward.”

“OK”.

So, I applied to withdraw, and it was accepted.

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Thanksgiving

So, I was no longer in school. Now what? I had to go an extra semester now, on top of the extra year I was already is because my first year was at another university as a music major.

Sigh.