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I was one of those people that knew exactly what they wanted to do for a career from an early age. The teachers said I had the brains and talent to do it. My instructors said I had the ability to do it.
What I wanted was to play first chair first trumpet in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I won awards in high school and got a full ride scholarship to a very good university with the music program that I wanted.
And then came the hitch. In my senior year, after getting the scholarship, I sustained an injury to my mouth. The upper jaw was broken and I lost a lot of teeth. Oh, they tried to put them back in and hoped for the best, but it was a lost cause.
I kept going backwards in the college orchestra, until I could no longer play at all. They told me that I needed to find a new major, and I had two days to do it. WTF!!! It was a 4 year scholarship, but it could no longer be music, since the only way they defined music was as a musician (no composing or conducting coursework).
I went nuts trying to come with an idea for a major. One of my hobbies was ham radio and I had been reading articles about computers. I was walking past the student union the night before I had to declare, and they were watching an old sci-fi movie about robots and talking computers. I thought about it all night. The way that I thought about it was that it wasn't just me that had to make some changes in the way they thought about things. Big changes were in store for everyone, whether they knew it or not.
Computers seemed (to me) to be one of the driving forces of those changes, but it would be how we humans interacted with those computers. On the form the next morning I wrote "Psychology of Machines". That bought me time to refine my thoughts. I thought of it in both ways. Humans had to learn to work with machines (what was later called GUI design) and machines had to emulate humans (adaptive intelligence and robotics).
The clerks were quick to point out that there was no such major in their list. The professors were eager to help me create one. When it came time for grad school, they all seemed eager for me to pursue it.
And then came the real world.... No one came knocking, except those same universities wanting me to do more study and maybe teach.
An idea came to me, so I tried it out. I went on a tour of a well respected computer company. When it came time for the "important dude" in development to make his pitch, I waited politely until he finished and then I asked my question that I figured was one step beyond his vision for the next generation product capability. I repeated this process for a few more tours.
Every one of them offered me a job at the same time. I asked my grandfather about these offers, since he was savvy in financial matters. At his suggestion, I formed a one-person company and contacted all of them. A career was born.
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If ignorance is bliss then why are the ignorant so angry? - Shannon Wheeler
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