WeHaveNeverHitchhikedTo
SaginawVille
I have a confession to make.
Which is that I have something in common with Elon Musk.
Because, like Mr. Musk, I went to the United States on a student(ish) visa back in the go-go 1990's.
According to a trio of investigative journalists at the Washington Post, Musk ignored a major stipulation of his visa and never actually went to school, in this case graduate school in Palo Alto. Instead, Mr. Musk helped start a company called Global Link, which later became Zip2. Initially, pre-universal search engine, the company sold businesses a service that would give them an online presence. In 1999, just before the first the dot-com bubble burst, Zip2 was gobbled up by Compaq for 300 million dollars. At that time, the immigrant from South Africa, who was not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, eating the pets of Silicon Valley, made a cool 22 million.
I went to America on the reverse brain-drain ticket, which was a J-1 visa designed to lure STEM-types trainees to the country, many of whom stay legally afterward. I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which is perched above the University of California campus about half-way up the East Bay Hills. Initially, I was involved in a kind of public/private scientific partnership with a now famous pharmaceutical company that survived the bursting of the first biotech bubbles back in the 1980's. I worked feverishly on the project when I first got to the new lab in Berkeley and everything was set to really get rolling after a big Friday afternoon meeting about six months into my tenure. The following Monday my boss got a call from the company saying that they had decided to go 'in a different direction' and the project was dead. So much for curiosity-driven research.
In the end, the science part of my time as a post-doc worked out well enough that I got a few serious job offers, the best of which was to return to Lotusland, which we did a few years before Mr. Musk cashed in for the first time.
Just as, and perhaps more, importantly than the science stuff, the life thing really worked out well when C. and I lived in Berkeley. It was a truly exciting place to be at the time and we made many wonderful friends. We also had the first of our two wonderful kids, then tiny, now Bigger, E., and we came to love America and it all it can, and quite often does, stand for.
Here's hoping all of that has a chance to continue.
For America, I mean, come Tuesday...
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While I was really, really steamed at the time, it turned out to be a stroke of luck that the original post-doc project was killed by the company...Why?....Because it never would have worked...We were chasing after something in the soups produced by tumour cells that doesn't exist!...And just in case you might be, for some crazy reason, remotely interested in what we're chasing these days there's...This.
Image at the top of the post...At the infamous UC Berkeley Sather Gate with the two E's on a visit back to town a bunch of years after we left for home.
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3 comments:
In a lot of ways, the Bay Area seemed to really embody all that was best about the USA. I very nearly ended up there myself working for a large semiconductor company in San Jose. At the time I was impressed by the way they treated people they wanted to recruit, save for the requirement to piss into a cup before the offer was made official. In the end, I did not take the offer, electing to stay in Vancouver. A number of things influenced my decision, the frothy market at the time, and the fact that I'd just met a person I really liked in Vancouver. It's now 25 years later, that whole thing is a distant memory now, but that guy, he's still here (I can hear him upstairs talking to the cats). I'm down in the basement doom scrolling, reading about poll herding, and right-wing meltdowns about women.
Thanks for the "history", loved the pictures of the "revolts". Ah, it was a time. Wonder what happened to all those young protestors or did life and boredom turn them into Republicans, and not the sane ones.
All those protests and now the clock is being rolled back on rights fought for. Very very weird but things change and then we start over again.
Hit the link to the science bit at the bottom of the post. It is late for me to take in such weighty matter but I shall return to it with my morning cup of tea. I do so like hearing about developments in your chosen field. A field, I may add, Canadians have taken to like ice.
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