I had selected Case Institute of Technology because my uncle was on the faculty. Our family had moved from Long Beach, California to McLean, Virginia during the summer before my freshman year. My parents drove me to Cleveland, Ohio – where it is located – and I moved into the freshman dormitory with my first roommate (a chemist, he muttered about methyl-ethyl-ketone in his sleep).
Freshman and First Sophomore Year
My two main memories during my freshman year were: (1) working little and getting B’s while seeing others work constantly and fail; and, (2) hearing screams of frustration from others with their head out the dorm window (traditional behavior at Case). I continued working little and flunked out in the middle of my sophomore year.
The time I should have been studying I spent playing contract bridge. My bridge partner, who I’d gone to high school with, also went to Case. More mature than me, he was able to get good grades and still play bridge. He probably blamed me for his going to Case instead of MIT, where he also was accepted. This was justified as I’d tried to persuade him to go to Case. I lost touch with him after I flunked out the first time.
My physics course was an exception during my first sophomore year; I hadn’t done enough homework to memorize the formulas so I spent exam time deriving the ones I needed. This impressed my instructor enough that he gave me a D instead of failing me as I deserved. My other instructors gave me the grade I deserved, an F.
Second Sophomore Year
I returned home and found a job for 18 months testing electronic components. When I asked to return to Case, they required me to promise that I wouldn’t play bridge. So I played hearts – to be playing something – but the dean of students saw me playing and called me to his office. He told me: “You promised you wouldn’t play cards.” I responded: “I promised I wouldn’t play bridge, I was playing hearts.” He said: “We’re changing your promise to include all card games.” I responded: “We?” and left to find a bridge game – demonstrating my immaturity. A couple of months later I realized I was failing all my courses, asked for and received permission to withdraw from my classes (they kindly considered this “progress”), and I returned home planning to enlist in the Navy.
You may be wondering what my uncle said while I was being unpleasant to the dean of students (a neighbor) and flunking out. He was warm and kind throughout. I had a standing invitation to his house for Sunday dinner, enjoyed listening while he read out loud before dinner (as he did every day), and always felt welcomed. He and his family could not have been nicer.
In addition to being naturally a nice person, he may have been remembering his own past. His family lived in Dedham, Massachusetts, and thought he was working on his doctorate in physics at Harvard, a few towns away. They learned he was in Egypt when they received a picture postcard.
My father suggested the Coast Guard instead of the Navy; he said that my stuttering wouldn’t be as much of a barrier. I now believe that he saw the Vietnam War coming and was trying to keep me away from it. I joined the Coast Guard for one year active duty plus 5 years in the reserves. Boot camp was a good thing for me: while I’d played tennis in high school, I’d never been strong since I’d never done anything extra after polio (see Growing Up: Age 5-8; Isle Of Palms, SC).
The Coast Guard provided incentive to be stronger, and I met the requirements. One day they posted the armed forces qualifying test results for most of my group – not including me. As I knew my score, I was initially disappointed as it was higher than the highest posted. But that person was large, strong, and outgoing – accepting and enjoying the hard time that the cadre and recruits gave him. I couldn’t have done that. For the first time I began to get an idea of how much smarter than most I was, and began to think about what it meant.
After boot camp I went to a Navy fire-control technician school to learn how to maintain and use the equipment that aimed the guns. There I did well and began to help others if they had difficulty.
Third Sophomore Year
Case accepted me back and I moved back to Cleveland. And this time I had a car; my parents celebrated my new maturity by giving me my mother’s car, a Sunbeam Alpine sports car with a removable hard top. I moved into the same dormitory as my previous sophomore years. When the weather was good I left the hard top on the front lawn of the dormitory.
When I returned to campus I was surprised: the sophomore class that I was joining included girls – the first class at Case to do so. As the Case dorms lacked facilities for them, they lived in the Western Reserve dorms. No surprise, they were both smarter and more mature than most of their classmates. They needed to be as Case, like all engineering schools, is well supplied with students and faculty without social skills – a/k/a nerds.
Now a bit older and more comfortable with myself, I found friends and moved into an apartment with three others for my last two years. As she was dating one of my friends, I got to know Ruth – a math major at Case. One day she showed me a 30-page derivation she had just received back from her professor with the single notation at the end of “Not so” – and a low grade. (This was probably the result of her professor’s inability to communicate, not because she was a girl.)
On To Graduation
I majored in systems engineering while taking as many psychology and organizational behavior courses as possible. This exposed me to a greater gamut of professors than most. One of my organizational behavior professors was at the other extreme from Ruth’s. He frequently put a sign on his door that read “Yes I love you. I am very busy. Please go away.”
During the three years to graduation one of my clearest memories is of Professor Louis Green. I had taken Basic Mathematics from him my first sophomore year. It was the filter course for math majors; if you attempted all the homework, took all the tests, and were not a math major you were guaranteed at least a D – and you could stop being a math major until he had to turn in the grades. I lasted a month before I realized I was over my head, dropped the course, and changed my major.
The second encounter was when he was teaching the required math course for engineers in my third sophomore year to 600 students. The first test median was zero (60% received that), the average was 5, the high grade was 91, and I received a 45 – probably the highest relative grade I’d ever received. Professor Green had assumed that we knew the material and tested what we could do with it. The class rioted (in a well-behaved manner), hung him in effigy, and protested to the Dean – my uncle. They reached a compromise: another exam on the same material – to see if we’d learned it. This time the average was 85; I got another 45 – and a needed wakeup call. I skipped the last week of classes as it was review and I knew I’d learned the material. As I was walking out of the final exam he asked me: “Where were you last week?” I confessed. He asked: “How did you do, Fred?” (the first time he’d spoken to me in five years and he remembered my name), I replied, “I think I did well, but maybe I didn’t understand it at all and flunked it.” It was the former.
Another notable professor was Frederick Way; an early user and researcher in computers, he was one of the rare Case faculty members without a doctorate. When asked about it he usually responded: “Who is competent to examine me?” I was talking to him in his office one day and he mentioned a paper, went to one of the many tall stacks of paper, ran his fingers down one side – and pulled it out!
The Burroughs 220 computer at Case had a brass label on its On/Off switch: “Robert M. Kosterbanic Memorial Panic Button”. Bob had crashed the computer so many times that he was told he would need a memorial if he did it again.
Most of my friends had jobs when they graduated, I didn’t. I enrolled in the Educational Psychology department at Western Reserve University, across the street from Case. (Looking back, I clearly wasn’t as mature as I thought I was.) The course material was easy, but I was dismayed to learn that my advisor was working on a third repetition of the research for his doctorate – and when I read what he’d written (including his dissertation) I judged his research fatally flawed. This ended my interest in learning from him, so I left the program and returned home to look for a job. (Please see my First Real Jobs and Masters Degree post.)
July 14, 2020