Spiritual Autobiography - Part 3 - Education and Employment

Throughout my school years, I was always a bit of an outsider. I was too clumsy to be an athlete, too square to be cool and frankly a bit of a teacher’s pet. I had friends to hang around with in school and as I grew older, at their house or mine. I was in band and chorus in junior and senior high school. I was also on the A/V team and to this day dabble in A/V. I had the opportunity to attend the local Catholic high school, but passed it up for the public school. So, the only formal religious education I had in these years was weekly CCD at my parish.

In high school, I discovered that I was very good at chemistry and liked it. A variant of that, chemical engineering, became my major in college. I graduated with a BS in that field. College was a wonderful time to find myself, not so wonderful a time to get good grades. I did well in my major, but did not apply myself to the electives. I was very busy teaching astronomy in the planetarium (20+ hours a week). I was also playing the organ at the Newman Center Sunday liturgies. I spent a lot of my spare time with the members of the Newman Center folk group. My future wife was a guitarist in that group. When I went back for my M.S. in computer science many years later, I had a much more serious attitude towards learning and did quite well in my studies

My lack of discipline at college presented some job search problems. I was rejected by dozens of major companies and finally started at a small leather manufacturing company in Maine. Two years later, after Carmen and I married, my seventeen year tenure with Digital Equipment started. Over the last thirty plus years of employment, I’ve been an individual contributor and a supervisor. I’ve loved many of my jobs, tolerated one or two and only disliked one. I guess the one job that I disliked was at a time when Carmen was having serious medical issues. My manager was a few years out of college and did not support the flexibility I needed as a caregiver.

In almost every job, I’ve ended up as the unofficial leader. I’m the person co-workers come to when they need to talk or need advice. I’m OK with that. I’ve been a supervisor; it is not a fun job in today’s corporate environment.