Well, graduate school had allowed me to stave of adulthood, responsibility and the search for a real job for another seven years, but I finally had to put on my one good suit, buy a few nice shirts, and go out on the job market (or "meat market" as it is commonly called). I submitted over 100 applications and attended the big AMS/MAA convention in San Diego. I got nibbles from several schools, but by late April of '97 (fairly late in the game), I had only one offer, from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. I might have received other offers, but I'll never know since I accepted their offer and returned, like the prodigal, to the state of my birth.

It quickly became clear that I'd made the wrong choice. I started teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne in August; I handed in my resignation in January (although I did finish out the academic year). Although I like the idea of disseminating knowledge, the work was too much for me. The students at LRC had weak math backgrounds, and it seemed to me that too many of them had no interest in math, or learning for the sake of learning. Although there was certainly a difference in degree, I came to much the same conclusion during a brief teaching stint I performed at Carleton College in spring 1997. So I left LRC in May 1998 returned to the Twin Cities, and started looking for a job in industry.

Sometimes in life, a pattern repeats itself often enough that even I can see it. I left academia to pursue a career in the computer software industry, something for which I was almost totally unprepared. Once again, I had made the decision to do something I wasn't really ready to do, and I found myself sending out many resumes and hoping just to get my foot in the door.

After a few interviews, and a few near misses (at least so they seemed to me), the folks at Lawson Software --- a company with remarkable vision, I must say --- realized that if I could enter a doctoral program in mathematics with few qualifications and succeed, then probably I could be taught to write computer code. That was in November 1998. In more than four years, I've gained a lot of experience coding in C, Perl and Java. Once our product quality initiative is over, I'll return to coding Lawson-specific plugins for the Eclipse platform, in support of a possible redesign of our base environment code.

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