The Swartz.ws Blog

On this blog I usually only list links to other people’s articles. But I learned that one of my college friends left us. So it made me think of what my days were like way back then. So here is a rare article that I wrote…

What I remember from college is that I was poor. There were times when I didn’t have a car. There were times I slept on the cellar floor of an apartment of a friend. One particular day I needed a place to stay for the night and my friend Bill said I could stay at his place. I took a bus to my friend Bill’s place. His apartment was in the black projects. Walking in I got the glance from the locals that told me “what are you doing here white boy”. When I arrived I discovered two things about Bill’s place: One, he shared a bathroom with the rest of the floor (and it took 2 hours to get in there with all the crack heads vomiting) and two, he had no door on his apartment! I said, Bill you’re a white Jew and you’re living in a black slum and you have no door on your apartment. Aren’t you worried that someone will steal you stuff? His response was that he had no stuff. And it was true, Bill only had a small bag of cloths that he used as a pillow at night. I stayed there for a week and I found out his neighbors were mostly drug addicts and prostitutes. But then no one bothered us. I think everyone thought he was crazy and worried he might snap and kill everyone in the complex. I really think that’s what kept him safe. I on the other hand, emanated a sense of fear. My only salvation was that I was with the crazy Jew, and no one wanted to cross him.

As a side note, I was chemistry major and a pre-med student, Bill was biology major. We shared some common courses. Bill told me he was studying biology because without Bio and evolution we would not be here and we would have no need for a knowledge of chemistry. That along with some philosophical questions I developed during biochemistry, I decided to take on another major of biology.

Being I was so poor at the time, I got a state work study job in the Biology department as the manager of life science. Sounds impressive, but my job really was to change the rat cages. Well I discovered there was a whole room in the Science Building filled with fish tanks and equipment. No water and no fish, just tanks and equipment. Now Bill was working at a department store in the pet department and as such had access to lots of fish and I had the keys to the Science Building. This gave us an idea that turned out to be how we paid for our last two years of college. I would show up and buy several dozen fish at the pet department. Bill would charge me for a couple of guppies. I would then go back to the Science Building, where we had set-up most of the tanks and deposit the fish. Over the next two years, Bill and I would breed fish and sell them back to the department store. By our senior year we were the major supplier of fish stock to the whole department store chain!

Bill and I once had a course in Ethology (the study of animal behavor). The year before Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch jointy won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in Ethology so the field was exciting at the time. I don’t even remember what my course thesis was, but I do remember I got a B+. I’m sure it was some safe, center of the road subject. Bill on the other-hand was always pushing the edge. He decided his thesis would be on inter-spieses communication. WHAT? His idea was that all Chordates (animals with a backbone) yawn. And we all know that when someone yawns, it induces others to yawn. So Bill would sit for hours and yawn at the large fish tank in our secret fish factory. Did the fish yawn back? Thick about it, did they?... I have no idea. I don’t even know if the fish could see him. But he got an A in the course. Our professor thought that his project was the most original he had ever seen from an undergraduate student. Yes indeed, Bill was an original.

Another great college friend was Jamie. Another Bio major that was also a Physics major. It was his cellar apartment floor I used to sleep on. It was Jamie’s love of physics that made me sign on and take up physics as my minor. Jamie always told us that the men in his family don’t live to 50. So he always thought he needed to move fast though his life. No time to waste. We always thought this was bullshit.

Jamie was the cram master. He taught us how to cram for exams. One of us would read through the material and the others would interrupt and ask to have that subject explained. It was through this question and answer process that we really would master the subject. Bill, Jamie and I always did well on exams and were always in the top five of all our classes. I recently learned from a mutual friend that Jamie died of a massive heart attack several years back. He was 48. I guess it wasn’t bullshit.

I got a $500 grant from the physics department to develop a golf program. At the time I worked on a printer terminal that was connected to a large main frame computer at Princeton University. Hit the ball with a stated amount of force at a stated angle. Big whoop. I had some money left over so I wrote a Star Trek program that was such a big hit that Prinston took the program off the system do to overuse. At the time, I thought everyone would be working from a terminal and communicating with a large computer. As of today, I don’t think I was so wrong. Today, and in the future, the concept is to use a thin wire client to connect to databases in what is known as the cloud. This will put an end to the PC dominance. My advice is to buy stock in Google. Times, they are a changing.

I was now a senior and was looking at the job market. I went to college on a full scholarship so I really had no debt but I also had no money. Medical school was big bucks. My advisor told me about a new program in Medical Technology. A medical technologist is a specialist in laboratory testing. Sounded like a good idea because there was a huge demand in the job market, but the opportunity to get a spot was really limited. I submited my application but didn’t really give it much thought. It turns out that the Medical Technology program at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, NJ had opened up two spots that year. Normally the MT program at Beth Israel took in 12 students from Ruckers, the state university. This year they were taking ten students from Ruckers and two from other colleges or universities. One was to be selected from outside New Jersey and another was to be selected from one of the other NJ colleges or universities. Out of the hundreds that applied, I was fortunate to be selected. So I was looking forward to no summer vacation and full year of internship. For the first time I found myself surround by students who were all really, really sharp. There were no coasters in this program. We were 12 people who were selected out of about a thousand who applied. I was defiantly the least focused and least prepared of the class. I really had to step up my game to get through this. We started at 6AM by drawing blood from patients and then performing the tests on these samples. This would be followed by 4 hours of classes. Our days Monday through Friday would start at 6AM and end no sooner than 6PM. On Saturday, I would also work 10 hours doing admissions and testing. Work and classes was 70 hours a week and then there was studying for exams in a very competitive environment. I would never be able to do this now but at the time you were just in it and that was the way it was.

One of the brilliant things that the program did was to pair up the students. You would draw blood together and move through the various departments together. If your partner called out, you would have to do all the work yourself. No one ever called out sick all year. My partner in crime, the student I was paired up with was Mitch. Mitch was the other non-Ruckers student in the class. He was from the University of Kansas.

So I finally graduated after 5 years with 3 majors (the last one was Medical Technology) and a minor in physics. College life was tough but I wouldn’t have changed a thing. By the way, I now write computer programs and manage the computer systems of a medium size non-profit. So much for the study of chemistry, biology, medical technology and physics. So much for college life looking back 30 some years.

Glenn Beck crowd: Not so white as advertised

Mr. Beck Goes to Washington

There was a huge "Restoring Honor" rally at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, but you couldn't tell hours later given how clean the National Mall was:

Compare that to how this area looked after Inauguration Day on January 20, 2009:

The Left in our nation is always depicted by media sycophants as concerned with the environment.
By contrast, these same people always paint a picture of the Right being exclusively focused on profits with total disregard for nature and ecology.
What do these two videos say about this "conventional wisdom," and will Obama-loving media members in the post-rally coverage of this event point out to readers and viewers just how clean our National Mall was left by these awful, greedy, right-wing extremists?

Barrack Obama, Wife living like a King and Queen!

How Bad Is It For Obama? Look How He's Completely Lost The New York Times

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Michelle Obama - It's Hell being the First Lady!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Obama Has Added More to National Debt Than Washington Thru Reagan -- COMBINED

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Christina Romer - Opps. My Bad

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

College Days

Our Clueless Government

Monday, August 30, 2010

Glenn Beck Rally in Washington

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Its Bush’s Fault that Obama is the Worst President in the Last Hundred Years…

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