I, Vadim Akselrod, was born. As, I suspect, were most of you.
Unlike many of you, however, I was born in
Leningrad, USSR (now known as
Saint Petersburg, Russia) under the sign of
Sagittarius. I spent
the first decade of my life on the other side of the iron curtain, until
my family made our triumphant escape in 1980, after years on the waiting
list to get out to visit some relatives abroad.
Seven months later, our refugee status was granted by the U.S. of A., and we set off from our temporary homes in Vienna and then Rome to the brave new world. Of Louisville, Kentucky. Now I have nothing against Louisville, Kentucky. I am very glad we found it, had relatives there (and nowhere else in the U.S., thus making our destination choice for us), and that we did not get blown away by the apparently weekly tornadoes. I'm sure it's a great place for many outstanding folk, especially ones who breed horses for speed or watch blue grass grow. I did have the pleasure of learning English there (fortunately, mostly from the fine language school of day-time television), but it was a difficult place to score a job for an optical engineer. Two at that - both of my parents sought such occupation.
So after several months in the midwest, my parents found jobs in the California, and we set off to the gold rush with a gleam of hope in our eyes. Where we landed was Hollywood. Now if you think 10 years in Leningrad, and another year and a half in Rome/Vienna/Louisville (I'll bet you never expected to see those three in the same sentence, eh?) prepares a boy for Hollywood... You'd be surprisingly right! The transition was relatively painless, and after some much-needed English as a Second Language training, I went to elementary school. One year and out. Thank goodness the American educational system is slow - I was still ahead of the pack knowing scant English and skipping a grade.
Elementary school passed, and I managed to escape mostly intact (though the mind is questionable). My family moved to the 'burbs of L.A. - Claremont. This was where I would go to Junior High, High School, and though I did not suspect it at the time, college.
Fortune must have emerged from behind the thunder clouds to shine on me there, as I made about the greatest bunch of friends a guy can hope for. All of us were right there in El Roble Junior High and Claremont High School. My best friends today are those I met in school way back when. I really should tell you more about them. Ask - I will...
As a foreshadowing of my career to be, the most notable part of junior high was ditching class regularly to use the two Apple //+'s in the library. I used them at breaks, lunch, and after school, but the popular times were restricted to 15 minutes per use due to long waiting lists to give everyone a chance. Ditching class was much more fulfilling for my addiction. I used the computers very efficiently in those days. I played games. I got to hacking and programming new games a bit, but not nearly as much as many of my friends. I just liked to play games.
Still do. All kinds of games that I loved then are still with me today, though the ability to find play time is something I seem to have lost. Let me name the types of games I like:
That probably gives you an idea of what I did in high school. But you'd forget one thing. What does every teenager do? Watch 8 hours of TV daily, of course! I had to set 8 hours as a limit though. A minimum limit. It if was on TV in the '80s, I knew it inside and out. Just try me... 8')
This might explain why I did not get into my top college choices. I am proud to say that I got rejected by more colleges than most people apply to. Well, okay, so maybe "proud" is not quite the word I'm looking for. After the storm of rejection letters settled, I "decided" to go to Pomona College - a very nice liberal arts school in a cluster of 5 schools. The education was good, the student body friendly, the environment nice. It was a really good college. The main problem was that it was located 3 miles from my high school. And, more importantly, 5 miles from home and mom.
Small digression here - my mom and dad got divorced as I finished high school and remarried while I was in college. Now they're both much happier and living in Northern California. But that's yet to come...
I started Pomona doing what any good liberal arts student ought - taking a bunch of classes that seem cool & easy to do well in. That got boring quickly, and I started taking challenging courses. To help defray the cost of my education, I got a job working 20-25 hours/week during school and 40-50 hours/week during breaks at Iolab Corporation, then a division of Johnson & Johnson as a Senior CAD/CAM Systems Operator. This was basically a job doing backups, playing system administrator, and drawing CAD stuff from time to time. A great learning experience. Along with college my jobs as a high school counselor (Claremont High), a real estate broker's assistant (Cushman & Wakefield), a system administrator (Pomona College Math Department), and a contract programmer (Pitzer College) gave me a pretty good business sense by the time I emerged with a B.A.
I had no major declared half-way through my junior year, which was a bad thing. This pressured Pomona College to approve my petition to create a computer science major. I then declared myself a double major - economics and computer science. I have the honor of being the very first official computer science graduate from Pomona College. Many talents have already and will continue to tread upon the trail I bladed there - and that's a good feeling.
What will probably end up being the greatest 6 months of my life happened in my college days. But not at Pomona. Pomona College let me go on a semester abroad program at University College at Oxford University in England. In retrospect, I do not understand how it was possible to do so much, so well, at the same time, and feel relaxed doing it. I joined the crew team, we to 4 classes (getting straight A+'s), had to cycle through several people to teach me computer science so as not to run out of things they could teach me, went pub crawling regularly, joined the Wychwood Warriors - a medieval warring and reveling group, took seminars in Unix and C++, explored the countryside, and spent plenty of time with newly-made friends and fellow program participants. It was a peak experience with a 6 month duration.
I used the times before and after Oxford to travel Europe. Loved it!
My options after Pomona were three-fold: work, Master's in computer science, MBA. Too lazy to do real work, I had to choose between a Carnegie-Mellon MBA program and a Stanford MSCS. Carnegie-Mellon wanted $25k/year from me, but I found a research assistantship at Stanford that resulted in me getting paid $15k/year to attend. No contest.
My dad had remarried and now lives in Northern California, so Stanford was no parental escape, but that was not such a bad thing. I concentrated on artificial intelligence (robotics) and user interfaces at Stanford and got my MSCS in '93. Then in was time for the real world...