I bought an iPhone for my wife the other day (it was the 3GS 8GB model that was free, which appealed to my Scottish origin). This post isn’t about the iPhone, but as my wife was impressed with the experience, the conversation surrounding it led to a discussion about the statement Steve Jobs made during his commencement speech at Stanford U.
Mr. Jobs talked about how he dropped out of college – partially. Basically, he abandoned his major of studies and ‘dropped in’ on various classes of interest to him. From that, he said (and I paraphrase) that it led to the birth of the Mac, which we all know today to be a fine piece of equipment, no matter which flavor one partakes of.
That got me to thinking about my own story. I too had been in college in my early adult life, and just like Mr. Jobs, I dropped out. I was an electrical engineering student at a local community college. I got there because I graduated in the top tenth of my class with a 3.06 GPA. The ironic part of it was that I was pretty much a slacker throughout high school. Metal shop and (eventually) computers were my interests, because I was a very practical minded person. Sure, math, science, and the other core academics had their place (nobody would want someone who couldn’t add or subtract milling metal stock that would be instrumental in keeping an aircraft at 30,000 feet with hundreds of passengers aboard), but to me, I enjoyed seeing concept becoming a finished product. More importantly, I was a hands-on person that liked to touch every stage of production. Kind of like an artist, but using machines instead of art supplies. When my four year sentence at the local high school was commuted, I found myself, not at a fork in the road, but at the base of a seemingly immense mountain. It was actually a hill, but any hill looks like a mountain when you’re smack-dab in front of it. I left the graduation ceremony not knowing what I was going to do with myself.
Since I liked to tinker with electronics and didn’t have the luxury of taking any formal classes on it during high school, I enrolled in Electrical Engineering at the college where I had been given a two-year scholarship. I figured I’d eventually be designing some high-tech computer components that would solve complex problems. Boy was I wrong. My first semester had me wondering how anyone would subject themselves to such boring material. I did pretty well in English comp, but learned that homework, which I spent the last four years blowing off, was really critical when taking trigonometry and higher level math courses. During my second and third semesters, before I had trashed my academic progress so badly that I lost the remainder of my scholarship, I dropped in on a couple of classes on PC networking using Netware 3.12. I was also employed at the college and had been a co-instructor for a nighttime PC repair class there. Over time, between those classes and taking a job at the college maintaining lab PCs, I discovered that pursuing a degree in EE was not what was in my best interest.
Then the letter came. I came to the realization that I had trashed my chances of completing my AA degree when I read that my scholarship was being revoked for three reasons: 1) my GPA was below the acceptable threshold, 2) I spent too many credits on elective classes, meaning I would not graduate on the scholarship alone, and 3) I wasn’t maintaining full-time status, on account of being employed full-time by this time. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
I got married in the fall of my sophomore year in college. Just prior to that event, I received news that the grant money which funded the department in which I worked at the college had been cut back such that I could only work about eight hours a week. I went from about 30 hours down to 8, which made it impractical to continue working there.
Shortly after getting married, I interviewed at Computer City for two positions in preparation for the Christmas season in ’94. One was in sales; the other was the configuration desk at the back office repair facility. I was offered the sales position and the manager offered to keep it open to me, had the configuration tech position not panned out. I was offered the configuration tech position and eventually moved up the ranks, meaning I got a more regular, predictable schedule and was performing repairs, which earned more commission per capita than installing memory, hard disks, and other peripherals.
Armed with some knowledge of networking, Netware 3.12, and a good deal of enthusiasm to expand the horizons of the back office service center, I approached the division director and asked him what he thought about having us perform onsite services and getting more involved with networking and the network OSes. After all, those services were listed on our rate chart, so why not? His reply was like the seasoned hunter skillfully shooting down an unsuspecting water foul in total coolness. They were nice enough to pay for me to take my A+ exam, though. I took it and passed it with absolutely no preparation other than on-the-job experience (one with a score of 90% and the other with a score of 100%; it consisted of two sections in ’96).
I interviewed with a company called Bay Resources out of St. Petersburg, FL in 1996 and accepted an offer from them. The pay was about the same and it involved some driving. The good of it was that there was clearly-defined advancement opportunities, once I got used to not being a bench tech anymore. Tom, the service manager, offered me a significant raise if I could get MCSE-certified within a certain timeframe, putting me on the advanced services team, where I would be performing the kind of work I proposed to the division director at my previous post. From the wisdom of the last chapter of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, “Wait and hope”. Had I stayed the course of a college education at the time, I would have probably amassed more than just the $3600 student loan debt from that computer I so badly ‘needed’. It only cost about $1000 between books and exams to get certified, all of which was taken on by my employer.
Since then, I have been laid off twice, started and closed my own business, and have moved to another state. I have been a consultant twice, worked with the DoD and small, medium, and large companies. Like Steve Jobs, had I not dropped out of what would probably have been a dead-end career for me and dropped in on something interesting, there’s no telling what it would be like for me and those in my sphere of influence. I really think folks need to look at their lives and apply that little bit of wisdom. There is a good deal of disillusionment going around because of this idea that a college education equates to a better way of life. Maybe it’s time to start listening to more stories from successful college dropouts and less from broke graduates.
