For those that don’t know, I’ll give you a little of my educational background. I left high school with 32 AP credits (which can be applied toward college credit). When choosing a university, the acceptance rate of those credits toward my degree was among my criteria. It’s expensive to go to school out of state, and minimizing my post-college debt was important to me. At that point, a $30,000/yr price tag was too much for me to fathom. I ended up choosing the University of Michigan, which happened to meet all my criteria, AP credits included.

I carefully planned my schedule so that I could get my B.S.E. in 3 years, with plans for a M.S.E. in 4-4.5. I succeeded and graduated with honors in 3 years. Along the way I had the opportunity to work for Amazon and Apple, two very well-known companies in the world of computer science. At Apple, on the south end of Silicon Valley, my entrepreneurial inner child was getting restless. Coming back from WWDC (apple’s huge developer conference), I ran into one of the engineers at my current company (YouNoodle), we hit it off, and I decided to ditch grad school and come to work full time. That’s the synopsis, but let’s rewind a little.

When I think back on college, a few things stick out in my mind. The first is my ex-girlfriend, then my friends, my fraternity, and lastly my schooling.

It was the beginning of freshmen year, a time of trepidation and excitement for all the new people on campus. It’s the first time many are living outside the shelter of their parents roof, and the best part is: nobody knows anyone. At least, that was the best part for me. Everyone was desperate to make friends. You could walk up to anyone and they would actively try to find something in common with you—I wish everyone was like that all the time. The University groups would make you play dumb games to get to know one another, and everyone went along with it because they didn’t have any better ideas. It worked. Most of the people I still keep in touch with I met freshmen year. One of these silly events was also where I met Marie. It was a scavenger hunt on North Campus, to help show us the lay of the land. We were to divide ourselves into groups of 10, and hastily follow the clues to reach some unknown prize. Everyone looked at each other stupidly. When nobody knows anyone, how could they divide themselves up? Having little patience for this, my expert leadership skills kicked in and I went to grab the list of clues. I then pointed arbitrarily at 9 others nearby, and said they were on my team. We were one of the first teams to get started… Anyway, Marie was in this group, and I suppose she was taken with my arbitrary decision making ability and stunning good looks, so she came to talk to me as we wandered around North Campus trying to figure out in what year some building was built, among other things. I don’t remember what we talked about, but that was when we met. After that, I saw her playing frisbee outside our dorms, got her phone number and things started rolling. Sometimes even in the mud.

We had a great time for probably 2.8 of our 3 years together. I had commitment issues. Stereotypical, I know. I didn’t know w

hat I wanted to do with my life, much less who was going to be in it forever. I learned a lot about relationships though—that was my first long term one. At the same time, I feel like having the same girlfriend all through college stifled my social life. I have more high school friends than I can count, and gained more confidants there than I have appendages. From college, I have uncountable acquaintances, a few friends, and less than a handful of confidants. My high school had 1200 people and my college had 40,000. How the hell does that happen? Long term girlfriend, that’s how. If our relationship had worked out, I wouldn’t have traded more close friends (or anything, really) for it. But it didn’t. My advice: take advantage of the early social atmosphere. Make friends. Stick your hand in many honey pots—how you interpret this particular juicy metaphor depends on your style. I didn’t mean for it to be (that) dirty, so get your mind out of the gutter.

Like leaving anywhere I’ve been for a long time, I’m going to miss my friends the most. From cookie baking in MoJo to offering a shoulder to cry on, my friends got me through college. No question.

I worry about my college friends the most though. College isn’t my home town. I may not go back that often. When I do, will they be there? Some of them probably will; many people never really leave home. A lot of them were meant for bigger things though. I know people from college all over the country now, and that will only get worse as more of my friends graduate. I’ll have to try to coordinate visits with all the people I’ll miss most. You know who you are.

One of my favorite things to do on campus was to wander around and find all the little oddities that most people aren’t curious enough to even notice. There was this shed (later christened the love shack) on North Campus, right off of Fuller as you pull into North Campus along the bus route. The tip of the roof barely pokes out above the brush surrounding it. There were a few other artifacts inside and around the shack that all seem to once have had greater purpose. One in particular was memorable because Trey actually got inside it — we called it the man trap, because it bore a remarkable resemblance to a mouse trap. If it wasn’t completely overgrown and clogged, I might’ve worried more for his well-being.

The bar crawls were also memorable. Nothing beats a boot (yes, of beer), the free taco bar, and great company shooting the breeze at the Heidelberg.


Triangle, my fraternity, has a stated purpose of “Developing balanced men in engineering, architecture, and science by providing an environment which fosters personal growth and professional success.” It met those goals, but I had to help out. A lot. I was unsure about being “Greek” as any sane non-legacy should be. I was reassured by the state of my organization of choice. It was in its infancy. That meant I would be able to play a strong role in shaping its growth. During my 3 years there, I held a position every semester. I started at webmaster and worked my way up through the presidency and remained the general counsel beyond there. My thoughts and ideas touched every aspect of our organization: community service, university relations, pledge education, operational organization, parties, recruitment policies, etc. The things I’m most proud of are the recruitment policies. We go through the same “rush” process as the rest of the fraternities. And rush is not a misnomer — the historical origins of the term, while interesting, don’t help my point as much as the literal meaning — our campus has 4 days to appeal to, and decide between, anyone that may be interested in joining. Our fraternity is the only one that I know of that interviews its candidates. We put them on the spot, and ask hard questions. We figure out who’s there for the right reasons: brotherhood, self betterment, etc and immediately weed out the ones who are just there for our awesome parties (which we have, believe it or not). I don’t want our organization turning into just another frat. We’re More than a Fraternity®. As part of our pledge education, our members have required reading! I made them pick something from our “Leadership Library” which includes titles assembled from interfraternal leaders and alumni. It includes Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, and many many others. I found some of these books very interesting, and they sparked my passion for leadership and dealing with people. I hope it did the same for the pledges I taught. They probably hated it. Oh well, it was good for them. I can say things like that now. I’m their elder.

I was privileged enough to watch the fraternity grow up. When I joined, we had ~10 people, a tiny “house” that was really just where some of our guys lived, and we held our chapter meetings in the union. When I left, we had 52 people, a huge, awesome house, a steady growth rate, and about 100 times more awesomeness. I can’t wait to see how this fall’s rush goes. We’re nearing the point where we won’t need to recruit people—they’ll all come to us.


Lastly comes my schooling. Theoretically this is the most important part of college, but in practice that’s not true at all. Sure, I learned things, it even prepared me for my career reasonably well. I suppose, for what I paid, it should at least have done that. But really, the best part of a michigan education isn’t what I learned there (I could’ve done that anywhere), it’s the doors that network opened for me.

Michigan has the largest body of living alumni. That’s probably my favorite part of the school. Anywhere in the world, if I’m wearing a Michigan block “M” someone will yell “Go Blue!” It happens to me all over the states and in Europe as well. By graduating from Michigan’s engineering school (which was top ten in every degree it offered while I was there), I was able to get interviews from any company I wanted. Once my foot was in the door, I just had to show I was competent, and job offers flowed right in. There will be a few professors that I’ll miss, but I didn’t get to spend enough time with any to build long-lasting relationships. Despite that, they managed to show me some of the advantages of academia. There is something quixotically appealing about academic research that I regret missing out on. The “real world” is so deadline or profit driven that it’s hard to justify research that, while intellectually stimulating, may not pay off. I’m hoping to find something interesting enough to work on that it will almost be like an idealistic university research project. My current company should be able to offer me that kind of opportunity, and I’m excited to explore what it might be.

It’s past my bedtime. G’night!