I grew up in the Navy, flunked out of undergraduate school twice, have a DBA in Financial Institutions and Markets from Harvard Business School, taught finance for twenty years, and consulted for thirty years. I’m now retired, living in Rhode Island, and am writing this blog because (1) doing so is interesting; (2) boredom from social distancing; and, (3) people have encouraged me to do so.

My father was a Naval officer, so we moved every 2-4 years: The most unusual places were Guam, where we could take a shuttle bus to the beach every day; and, Annapolis, where we lived in a house across the river from the Naval Academy that had belonged to the people who owned the peninsular.

As I was shy – resulting from polio at age five with resultant stuttering – I sometimes had difficulty making new friends, but eventually I made them. When we lived in dependents housing (Guam and Long Beach, CA) it was easier as others were in the same situation.

In high school (Long Beach) I learned to play contract bridge, which became a passion lasting decades. I read everything then written, played against some of the best (Long Beach was a hotbed), and prepared to go to college. As I wear glasses I eliminated the Naval Academy as my choices there were Engineering Duty (a good thing, as this was my father’s specialty) and Supply Core (a bad thing, as I knew nothing about it).

I was very nervous taking standardized tests like the SAT; I worked quickly, finished early, and waited for the others to finish (as I was too keyed up to check my work). My first results seemed too low. By forcing myself to work more slowly I raised my scores by a total of 200 points in each section in my two subsequent tries. This, combined with decent grades saw me accepted by most of my colleges. Eventually, it came down to a choice between MIT and Case Institute of Technology: I had family near MIT, but my father’s oldest brother was on the faculty at Case – so I went there.

Case was the first of the two colleges I attended full time. I flunked out of it twice before continuing to graduate. Even then, I had to go to summer school after the graduation ceremony to lift my cumulative GPA above the minimum. Later, Harvard Business School dropped me from its doctoral program – and I still completed it. When I was teaching I occasionally had a student tell me that the grade they’d earned would ruin their life. My response was “I have 24 credit hours of F, it hasn’t ruined my life.”