Mephistos

Old Alumnus

By Ray on October 21st, 2008

Despite not feeling so great early today, I went to do this alumni networking event at my old university, Transylvania, this eve. In theory, I went mostly to met up and see what alumni were active here in the Lexington area as well as actually do some networking. It was also a nice opportunity to see the inside of some of campus halls that I had not seen in at least fifteen years. The event was designed for giving some insight to the incoming freshmen class as to what they could expect in the real world in regards to particular majors. In theory it could also be a networking opportunity for upper class-men to met people who are out in the world, but the only ones I noted in attendance that were not the poor required freshman in University Studies 101 were those students that had volunteered to assist their respective major.

As I arrived on campus I immediately went back to between 16 and 20 years ago when I was there. Granted, I have driven around campus on almost all sides since then and even walked through a couple of times from Gratz Park as well as ridden a bike through parts of a couple of times, but there is just something different about parking and walking across Broadway between Forrier Hall and the academic side of campus. My mind immediately went back to the frisbee golf course, that include a hole where you had to tee off on one side of Broadway and the ‘hole’, a mere post, was down the street on the other side. It was recommended not to play at 5:00ish in the afternoon. I also recall the time some jerk eased over in rainstorm and caught the full water runoff, throwing it up over me and a close friend.

As I went into the building, looking for a registration table and a name-tag, I recall when I did that same thing back during my campus visit to the same student center more the 20 years ago. Tonight, just as then, dinner was on the house. The small group of alumni were lead over to the cafeteria, like we may not have recalled where it was. The cafeteria had changed some, but was still pretty decent, especially when measured against other cafeterias. The President’s room was our dining exclusion this eve – which I had been in on occasion before but never this casually. During dinner I spoke with several folks, one of which was a Spanish major, most of whom were more recent graduates then I, but there were a few older alumni sprinkled in here and there. I found the lawyer and the very recent history graduate most interesting and we spoke of taking upper level Spanish classes, my history based jousting hobby, and several other things.

We then went to the networking and major display area. I could tell as soon as I saw them, who were the students representing the computer science department. A geek just has that look to them. Oddly enough computer science is not the glamorous field it once was, despite being the highest paying career choice the first year out of Transylvania (granted lawyers make more, but they have what at least four-five more years? Same with doctors). So we got the time to talk between myself, other comp-sci alumni, and those seniors in the program now. Oh, almost left out the history major talking about the pseudo co-ed dorm (Hazelrigg Hall) that opened while I was on campus and that I lived in two years, though only one of those was official. She spoke of the stories she had heard from previous residents that had lived there and they were legend and I shall not say more about what she spoke of to keep from tarnishing my reputation.

Comparing some quick notes, my class in 1992 had seven CS majors, the 2002 class had fifteen or sixteen, and the current class has four. My class was odd for the late 80′s – early 90′s in that it was more than half female, the class in 2002 was similar mixed, today’s class is all male and indeed apparently is almost all of the program. Math was always required in my day, though the amount of math could be varied based on science versus business emphasis – the most recent program has eliminated nearly all the math <GASP> to attract more students into the program. All students and alumni had Dr. Miller, though he retired last year. They have also all had Dr. Garrett who started right around the time I was there. That was the first hint I was old. They have also all had Dr. Mormon, who to me is just Kenny and graduated from Transy the year before I did with a triple major in CS, physic, and math – count that as the second hint I was getting old, but still I was not paying too much attention to it.

As the evening went on, I noted some of the projects they were doing, and while different languages and updated versions, the graphics function morphing program could easily be seen as a related to work I did with smoothing out Bezier curves, graphically speaking of course, at some point while I was there. We almost all agreed that Linux was sexy, especially the Ubuntu distro. Python and C++ are the preferred programming languages, though things are worked on in ASP and PHP for web-based development, and no one wanted to do things in Assembler, Fortran, or even Pascal. And they all seemed to think pulling an ‘all-nighter’ in the computer lab was a new thing.

Right before the time ran out and things closed up, a young attractive blond student walked near to the CS table. She was motioned over by one of the other students, who apparently new her from high school at maybe Lexingon Catholic. He tried to convince her of the dark side and that computers were the wave of the future, money to be had. She was not really buying into and headed off. He said, “That was Dr. Dean-Thacker’s daughter, was she here when you were here?  She has been here a while.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather at that moment. I don’t recall the girl’s name, but I am pretty sure she was born during my freshman year at Transy. Dr. Veronica Dean-Thacker was the primary Spanish professor at the time I was there. My ex-wife was a Spanish major and I took more than the required Spanish I needed to graduate, including some Spanish literature classes (I read medieval romances by Spanish authors from the 13-15th centuries). My ex was even a baby sitter for this young nineteen year old or so lady when her folks went out a couple of times. This was pretty much the full slam in the face to feeling old and got me harder than probably anything ever has before.

It is the kind of thing that rally does make me want to go out and look up everyone I ever associated with in those days and say “Ray-Guy Bash – Friday night.” Oh, and actually, given it is almost Halloween, the curse of Rafinisque, and just the name Transy, let’s do it two Fridays in a row. What a time to go back.