Class Memories

It was April of my senior year in high school, and I'd been rejected from the four Ivy League schools I applied to. We were living in Houston and I'd been accepted to Baylor, but really didn't want to go to school in Waco, Texas. My parents announced we'd probably be moving back up north, so I started a giant second round of college applications. My mother found the U of R and suggested I apply there because of the med school. (I was premed at the time.) I was accepted and entered that fall, living in temporary housing in Susan B. Anthony Hall.

For the first two months, I was convinced I'd still apply to Harvard as a transfer student, thinking I'd have a better chance of acceptance. But after visiting a friend at another upstate New York private university over October break, which in my opinion had very limited resources, I realized just how much Rochester had to offer. The library was enormous, the dining halls served a wide variety of palatable foods, and I enjoyed my classes and my professors. But most of all, when I returned to Rochester from that trip, I felt like I was coming home. I knew then that the University of Rochester was where I was supposed to land all along, and from that moment on, I knew that's where I'd stay.

For me the most vivid experiences happened outside the classroom on UR sports teams or clubs. Swinging on the flagpole or getting off-campus with friends are events that I easily recall. The transformative power of UR, however, was clearly the quality of faculty and curriculum and the simple message, deeply instilled, that if I could dream it I could do it. That empowerment was profound then, and it still operates daily in my career and in my community service. As I get older I have to be more selective about what good needs doing in the world that I can achieve and what is best left to others. But the enlightening message that vocation is the coming together of passion, talent, and need is something I would never have achieved except for the gift of a UR education.

I initially came to UR expecting to major in Physics however like many other incoming freshmen, my ultimate passion would be uncovered through a series of intentional discoveries and coincidental happenstances. In my case, it was the S-Men, the rock band I sang with in my sophomore year at college. Although we never became famous, we did create a following amongst the graduate students in Computer Science and through my interactions with these folks, I learned about the burgeoning field of Artificial Intelligence. I was so intrigued that I became one of the first UR students to graduate with a degree in Cognitive Science and a minor in Artificial Intelligence. It prepared me for an exciting career and that is my Meliora Moment.