University
By the time I got to Northwestern University in 1930, I was a football bum more interested in being an All-Star player and signing on with a pro team than going after a newspaper job.
My local newspaper, the 'Bend Bulletin', interviewed me while I was at high school after I had just signed with the University of Oregon. I remember I wore a University of Oregon hooded sweatshirt, and they took a picture of me in the long jump pit. I was freezing!
I was pretty sure I lacked the wisdom to be the commencement speaker, but after stewing over the idea for about 48 hours, I decided that if the senior class at the University of Wisconsin wants me to come speak, I'll do whatever they ask me. I love that school.
At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.
I've been accepted at Cambridge University. I want to study Chinese history and archaeology. I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.
I was a senior high school student at the Far Eastern University when the war with Japan broke out in 1941.
In summer 1961, Rose-Marie Egger became my wife, and her stabilizing influence has kept me on an even keel ever since. Our honeymoon trip led us to the United States where I spent two post-doc years working on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals in the group of Professor Bernie Serin at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In 1974/75, I spent a sabbatical year with Professor Vince Jaccarino and Dr. Alan King at the University of California in Santa Barbara to get a taste of nuclear magnetic resonance. We solved a specific problem on the bicritical point of MnF2, their home-base material. We traded experience, NMR, and critical phenomena.
I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.
I think people understand that if you're going to have a successful economy, you need people's potential to be realized. That means education. It means university education, sure, but it also means training, apprenticeships and various kinds of skills diplomas that we know are necessary.
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
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