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.
