jwg

High School reunions coming up

May 30, 2016 17:29

My 60th High School Reunions are coming up - on next Saturday, and the other the following Friday. Why 2? I went to Dalton School in NYC for 1st through 8th grades and at that time it was only co-ed through 8th grade; the high school was girls only. Now it is co-ed all the way. So then I went to Fieldston - now called Fieldston Ethical School for 9th through 12th grades - called Form III through Form VI. These were two excellent progressive private schools - and still are excellent. I loved them both - the facilities, the courses, the teachers, the many activities.

I'm looking forward to seeing the buildings - now quite different - and some of my classmates.

I did go to my 50th reunions - see here and enjoyed them both. After graduating from Fieldston I went to MIT and after that I was a PhD candidate in Physics at Columbia. In my first year at Columbia I had a part-time job teaching 7th and 8th grade science in Dalton.

At the end of that year I decided I didn't want to be a Mathematician, a Physicist, or a teacher. My father in one of his one-sentence pieces of advice said: You should take a computer progamming course. This was in 1961. You had to worry about the draft in those days and scholastic deferments were nice to have. I returned to Columbia with a mixed bag of courses and a few weeks into the programming course I knew what I wanted to do for my career. For the Spring term I came back to Cambridge, took several more courses at MIT as a Special Student while thinking of applying. Instead I found a job at Honeywell who was in the computer business then starting in the summer and that launched my career.

Another one of my father's one-sentence pieces of advice was when in my junior year of high school I was wondering about where to apply to colleges he said: Oh, you are going to MIT.

personal, reunion, career

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