Cross Country Travel 1990 - Part I

Couple of years ago, I had written about my first year in this country. That was in the left coast, now I am in the right coast. How did I get here?

The stated goal when I first came to the US was; learn automated chip testing and setup a chip testing facility in India to test chips used to support Bubble Memories. Towards this noble goal, I spent several weeks in a training facility at Schlumberger in San Jose, learning to read chip manuals and to write software based on the specifications. With help from my boss Ajay, I also created a novel high-speed technique to measure current; traditional current measurements required milli-seconds whereas we only had a few micro-seconds.

Anyway, within 6 months of my stay here, it was clear that the contract I came for would not be renewed for various reasons. I was dumb. Instead of finding another job in the Bay Area, I decided to look into academics. With my boss's blessing, I picked what I was told was a good school, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and several middle of the pack schools such as Michigan State (MSU) in East Lansing, MI, San Jose State in Bay Area, Oklahoma State in Still Water, OK, and lower ones such as Wayne State (WSU) in Detroit, MI. Do not ask me about my criteria for selecting these schools. I am sure I could not have put more than a limited amount of thought in the process; how else does one explain this rather more than random list of schools!

All except University of Wisconsin gave me admission; UW had good standards and they wanted to keep it that way! No school other than Wayne State gave me a scholarship. Without expending anymore thought than one would in changing clothes, I chose to uproot myself and move across the continent to MSU. You may ask, If WSU gave me scholarship why did I go to East Lansing?

Well my friend, PG who was then at MSU, assured me that if I got good grades during summer term, the chances of getting a Teaching Assistant ship (TA-ship) in fall was a near certainty. For those of you that did not go to graduate school in the USA, getting a TA-ship is akin to a professor getting a tenure, This meant that you were a cool-cat and you now had a little more financial security and consequently you could now afford to eat out once every other week at Pizza Hut!

Back to the answer; my thought process was; Detroit is a bare 100 miles away from East Lansing; if it did not pan out in MSU, I could always transfer to Detroit where I had a scholarship. I had the proverbial bird in hand. Anyway that is another story.

So here I was at the end of May 1990, in San Jose, CA ready to embark on a long journey. I had made my plans; I had PG's phone number in East Lansing, I had gotten my car checked out, I had changed the engine oil, and I had loaded the car with my worldly possessions. It is amusing that there was a time when everything I possessed could fit into the back of my Honda Civic with space to spare! Now my 4 bedroom house is not large enough!

That's it; I was ready. No wait, I also had gone to AAA of California and had gotten maps of the route I was going to follow!

I did not know how many days I was going to travel, I did not know where I was going to sleep each night, I did no know who I could call in case of emergencies! It is not that planning was an anathema to me; I just did not think! I had a map, I had a car, I had a rough idea that I was going to a place called Spartan Village in East Lansing; what more did I have to know!

I expressed my gratitude to the host family with whom I had been a paying guest for the past year and after saying my adieus, I drove away. It is hard to express the feelings that were going through my mind at that time. Many years later I heard these lines spoken by Morgan Freeman in one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption. You may remember that near the end of the movie, Red breaks parole and heads to Zihuatanejo, Mexico to be with his friend Andy. As he is riding the bus, you hear a voice over

... I find I am so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is an excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain ...