REFLECTIONS OF AN AMERICAN MUSLIM

[Continued]

By

Ahmed A. Qadeer

[The previous installment of this intermittent series ended with: I immediately started my search to transfer to another school with little time to work on applications before the due date.?Still, I must have filled out about one hundred applications to schools all over the country – some as famous as MIT and the University of Texas (if my memory does not fail me, in 1963, there was only one at Austin) and others that I had never heard of before I started reading the academic bulletin boards to see where graduate programs in structural engineering were being offered with teaching or research assistantships.]

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One very interesting episode worth mentioning, which took place on the Ohio University campus, is my first interview with my graduate advisor.?Since I had come to the campus in the middle of the academic year, there was not much in structural engineering that I could pursue.?That was because every course I was interested in had a pre-requisite that had been offered in the previous (fall) semester.?Therefore, I was limited to taking random courses to fill my fifteen (15) credit hours requirement.

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My professor advised me to take a course in computers that was being offered in the Mathematics Department.?I asked: “What is a computer?”?My good professor replied that it was a very fast calculator, which would help us engineers solve our equations in a fraction of the time it took (in those days) days and weeks.

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[Little did I know that one day, I would be earning my living by using that fast calculator to solve business problems as a systems engineer.]

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The course turned out to be in the theory of computational logic and computer design … sets of numbers, the union of sets, or their intersections – accumulators, registers, processors, machine language, binary computing, etc., etc.

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To be honest, I sat in that class thinking that I would surely fail that course as the lecturer’s explanations felt like bullets passing by my temples.?To my surprise, come final exam time, I ended the course with a B grade.?To this day, I cannot believe my score.?But. I was glad to accept it as my good fortune (due to my super genius!!)

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Before I left the Ohio University campus at the end of the Spring Semester, I had received a conditional admission letter from the University of Texas in Austin.?My admission was provisional until I passed the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).?Even though the sword of the GRE was hanging over my head, I was relaxed because I had no immediate pressure to find a new university to continue my studies.

I had a few days to join the university in Austin for a summer research assistantship.?I took the opportunity to take a Greyhound bus to Denver.?My childhood friend, Mujahid, had been bugging me to visit him there.?He was doing an internship with an architectural firm in Denver after finishing his degree in Architecture from Iowa.

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Mujahid and I had grown up in Karachi together.?His father and mine had been best friends from their college days.?So, we were like ‘cousins’.?He took good care of me during my stay of about a week in Denver.?He took me to the University of Colorado in Boulder to show me the beauty of the architecture of the campus buildings.?Indeed it was a beautiful campus until I would see the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina.

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We also went to Estes Park.?It reminded me of Murree Hills in Pakistan. However, Estes Park is much more beautiful with its pristine natural splendor of Bear Lake nearby, while Murree is over-commercialized.

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The traveler within us wouldn’t let us return to Denver from Estes Park without visiting Fort Collins which is nearby.?I do not have memories of that visit and the visit to Colorado Springs that we made the next day just to pay homage to the Air Force Academy – even though we did not act as typical tourists there too.

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[To be continued]

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First “posted” in two parts on 2023/03/17.