Brian Jepson’s Weblog

When I arrived on the URI campus in 1987, my idea of style was a leather trench coat and a briefcase. Add to that that I had just let Josh and my sister Shelli shave my head, and I figured I was one weird looking dude. In fact, I wasn’t. On numerous occasions, students just assumed I was the professor and would look at me expectantly until the real professor showed up.

Time passed, and I started to become a fixture: after a stint as a student manager in the Ram’s Den, I moved on to work as a computer programmer in the URI Memorial Union, where I got some amazing experience that later led to a job on Wall Street (more on that later). At the same time, URI became my entire world (a friend of mine had rearranged the letters from a University of Rhode Island sticker to put “Rhode Island is the Universe” on his rear window): I was business manager of the Good Five Cent Cigar, the student daily, an assistant editor on the campus literary magazine, the Great Swamp Gazette, and even started a coffeeshop called the Cafe de la Tete.

I did not want to leave. I had no post-graduation plans.

Then in 1992, the phone rang. About a month before that, I had posted my resume to Usenet, and Frank Grimberg, then of of Prosoft had found it. He wanted me to come work for his company and work as a consultant at JP Morgan at 60 Wall Street. So, leaving in my last semester of college, I moved to NYC with my first wife Pam.

A lot went on between then and now, both in my career and in my personal life. After Joan and I married, I started thinking about that degree. Combining the spousal tuition waiver with some gentle prodding from Joan and many other family members, I set to work. I took a little detour the first couple of semesters: Compiler Design, Precalculus, and Calc I, even though they didn’t satisfy any of my academic requirements toward my Linguistics degree.

I finally wrapped it all up last semester with an independent study under Professor Paul Arakelian. Now I’m thinking about what kind of frame I’ll put around my diploma.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 1:30 pm and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.