The way in which we decide on college for ourselves is, frankly, weird. When you’re 16 or 17, you make decisions that can affect the rest of your life and you do so without the information to make the decision properly. You do so without even the knowledge that you don’t have the information to make the decision properly.
As I’ve mentioned before, I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic for my undergraduate engineering education. In retrospect, it was a good choice: RPI is the oldest polytechnic in the country (and that history appealed to me) and the civil engineering department there is design-oriented (and so played to my desire to become a practicing engineer rather than a researcher). I don’t mind the cold, which is a good thing if you’re going to school in Troy NY, and it’s a smallish school, which I liked.
Why did I go there? In the summer before my senior year in high school, my father bought me a copy of The Great Bridge because he thought it would interest me. It did. It fascinated me. I’m not going to say that RPI was my first choice because when I was 16 I wanted to be Washington Roebling, but that’s not so very far from the truth.
I can draw a direct line from reading The Great Bridge in 1981 to the projects I work on today, many of which were new buildings when the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed. And that’s about as lucky as you can be.
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