The question of which college to attend was straightforward.  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, was reasonably close, offered a solid undergraduate program in physics, and also had a good pre-medical program for Gena.  Our parents were not thrilled, but they allowed us to attend the same college because we had shown ourselves to be sensible and mature as high school students.  I had fun and worked hard in college.  Physics and math were still my favorite subjects, although computers fascinated me as well.

In the early 1970's, most computer programming was done by typing each line of the program on a "keypunch" machine that punched holes into rectangular cards using a special code first developed by Herman Hollerith for tabulating the 1890 U.S. census.  (The company he founded in 1896 to market his machine to the general business community was the basis of IBM.)  After collecting all of your cards (lines) for your program and data into a deck - heaven help you if you dropped them and got them out of order! - you passed your deck through a hole in the wall to the computer operator who would load them into the computer's card reader when it was your turn to run the program.  If the gods of IBM were with you, your job would be finished a few hours later and a computer printout would be waiting along with your deck.  If there was a bug in your program, you would type replacement cards to fix the errors, insert them into your deck at the appropriate spots, and resubmit the job.  Students commonly made mistakes with printing control commands that would cause reams of blank paper to spew out of the printer.  The operators hated when that happened!  This activity occurred all hours of the day and night in Amos Eaton Hall at RPI.  Students typed their cards in a special room reserved for them.  I spent many hours there as an undergraduate.  In my memory, I can still smell the peculiar odor of lubricating oil mixed with cardboard dust that emanated from the keypunch machines.

As I reached my senior year, the question of Vietnam and the draft began to loom large.  The tide of public opinion had turned against the war, but President Nixon was still pursuing military operations in order to give Secretary of State Kissinger more bargaining power at the peace conference, or so the theory went.  Student deferments - by then recognized as a convenient way out of the draft for the middle and upper classes - were eliminated in favor of a draft lottery.  It was an idea that had been used in previous American wars:  All of the dates of a given birth year were placed inside capsules to be drawn randomly from a jar.  All males born in that year were assigned numbers 1-365 based on the order their respective birthdays were drawn.  Young men with number 1 would be called first, then number 2, and so on.  As fate would have it, my birth date was 365, the last one.  In other words, I would be drafted only in case of a national emergency equivalent to World War II.  That was the end of draft worries for me.  Years later, I would wonder:  Had I missed a critical male rite of passage by avoiding military service?  I don't know the answer.

The next step after RPI was graduate school.  I was fortunate to be accepted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.  The only sadness was that Gena would be starting medical school at the Medical College of Pennsylvania - known then as Women's Medical College - in Philadelphia.  We would be back to a long-distance relationship for several years.

I started Caltech in the fall of 1973.  Graduate school was a revelation, in some good ways and some bad.  While the curriculum at RPI had been difficult, at Caltech it was twice as difficult.  Many of the faculty were top names in physics, such as Richard Feynman, who lectured at the speed of thought.  For survival's sake, I acquired the habit of learning on my own from the textbook and other printed resources, rather than from lectures (a preference I retain to this day).  I earned my tuition and a small stipend as a teaching assistant in the sophomore physics laboratory, which proved to be a great learning experience for me as well as a source of income.

After one year of graduate school, in the spring of 1974, I decided that I still didn't know what Gena saw in me, but whatever it was, I probably wasn't getting any more of it and so I had better lock down the deal.  I asked her to marry me, and she accepted.  We (she) only had a few months to plan the wedding, so we kept it simple.  I flew to Pennsylvania, we had a very short honeymoon, and then we set up housekeeping for the summer in an apartment in Pasadena within easy walking or bicycle distance of Caltech.  That was the happiest summer of my life, but the happiness ended (temporarily) when Gena returned to Philadelphia for her second year of medical school.  It was a tough year, but we were overjoyed when Gena was able to transfer to the University of Southern California for her final two (clinical) years of medical school.  Those years apart were difficult, but we survived.

When it came time to do my thesis, I discovered a fondness and affinity for theoretical electromagnetics.  Fortunately for me, Caltech is flexible with its graduate students and I was able to arrange a joint thesis project between the Departments of Physics and Electrical Engineering.  My thesis advisor was Professor Charles Papas, a well-known researcher in electromagnetics.  Coincidentally, he had ties to the Armenian community in Troy, New York, and so I always felt at home when I visited his office.  He asked me one question when I inquired if I could do a Ph.D. thesis with him: "What did God create first?"  I immediately replied: "Let there be light!"  His point was that electromagnetism (light) was the first step of creation.  I have never deduced whether he was testing my Biblical or scientific knowledge, but I was happy I knew the right answer.  I began my thesis work on electromagnetic wave propagation in 1975.

It may seem that I was far from home in Pasadena, but in fact my grandparents and aunt lived in Fresno, California, a few hours drive to the north.  Gena and I spent many weekends there, enjoying their company and eating my grandmother's delicious Armenian cooking, not to mention my grandfather's famous shish-kabob.  We also enjoyed visiting Gena's aunt, just about an hour's drive away in Thousand Oaks, California.

I completed my Ph.D. thesis in the summer of 1976 and successfully defended it prior to the beginning of the fall term.  (My degree was formally awarded during graduation ceremonies the next spring.)  Gena finished medical school in the spring of 1977 and began her internship at Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, California.

Last update: June 06, 2000