Higher Education

Upon graduating from high school, I attended Penn State (I never had thoughts of going elsewhere), majoring first in Biochemistry, then adding a dual major in Computer Science. However, I soon realized that I didn't really want to be a biochemist and I decided I preferred to graduate in 4 years rather than 5, so I switched to Microbiology and received my B.S.in Micro (with additional work in Comp Sci and Biochem).

In my freshman year I joined the Penn State Thespians and worked props again. In my sophomore year I joined the Penn State Archery club. When Archery conflicted with the Thespian troupe I chose Archery and remained a member of the Archery team until I graduated.

After graduation, I (briefly) tried a Forensic Science program at the University of New Haven, in West Haven, Connecticut before heading off to the University of Maryland, where I received an M.S. in Microbiology. Not that I wanted to be a microbiologist, but it was the easiest graduate program to get into while I was figuring out what I did want to do.

While in Maryland, I met Rich Morin, who became my spouse and best (non-feline) friend, discovered the Unix Operating System (on Rich's recently acquired Sun Workstation, ser. #283), and decided that the best career for me would be working with computers. This wasn't that new an idea; I had dithered over whether to major in Computer Science at Penn State, and had taken about 2/3 of a CompSci program.

I began to investigate how to come up with a thesis project that would apply computer programming technology to biology (not as popular or accepted an idea then as it is today!). Luckily, I found an amenable and forward-thinking advisor who had piles of data that needed analyzing. My thesis project was a statistical analysis of bacterial resistance data in cultures from sewage-contaminated water vs. clean ocean. I did the analysis and graphics; the other folks on the project treated water samples with toxic chemicals; both sides were convinced the other had the harder task :-)

I wrote the code in awk and sed, on the Sun workstation. The text was written in vi, typeset in nroff and printed (final copy) on a Datel 30 (essentially an electric typerwriter with a serial interface). No GUI, no windows, no WYSIWYG word processors, no laser printer. After I finished the thesis, I converted the awk scripts to FORTRAN for my advisor (to run on her Calcomp plotter.)

My thesis project got me my name on a real scientific paper in a real journal. It also helped get me my first "real" job.