After talking to a lot of people, I finally met one who was kind enough to offer me a research assistantship for the first quarter. It was a bit late to be looking for teaching assistantships because they had mostly been filled earlier in the summer. So I arrived a week before the fall semester began at Stanford, and started knocking on all the professors’ doors asking if they had any scholarships open. But my parents were generous and said, “we can support you for the first quarter, and then you need to figure something out and find an assistantship through the university.” Knowing that my parents could pay for the first quarter was comforting, but at the same time, I did not want to burden my parents with that much of a financial commitment. The overwhelming sense was that if I wanted to work with computers, being on the west coast was the better choice. I consulted with my parents and my brother. As you can guess, it was a tough decision to make. The difference between the two was that Stanford gave me no scholarship, whereas UIUC did. Both institutions have really good computer science programs. Jaikumar: When I was in my senior year at Clemson University, I applied to a few graduate schools across the country, and I got accepted into both Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What factors led you to attend Stanford University to pursue a master’s degree? Writing software to me was a very creative experience because in essence you are creating something new from some basic raw material very akin to woodworking and pottery, but in a digital world. I think that is about as deep as I had thought about it. I felt really fortunate that someone would pay me for doing something that I enjoyed. All I knew was that I really loved technology. Jaikumar: I didn’t give it too much thought. When you were at Clemson University, what were your career inspirations? In terms of role models, it was the early days of tech and I didn’t have any particular person that I aspired to be like. I wasn’t thinking of it as a career back then. We had a great time building games and learning from each other. In high school, I would organize late-night programming sessions with my friends. That was the genesis of my love affair with writing code. So, I pleaded with my parents to purchase it and luckily they did! After I got the device, I went through the entire manual to learn my first programming language. That device looked really interesting to me. It was a small rectangular device with a keyboard that would connect to a TV, and you could write programs in BASIC on it. When I was a sophomore in high school in the mid-eighties, my family and I visited Malaysia and there I saw ads for a computer called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, made by a British company. Jaikumar: I grew up in Bangalore, India, until the age of 17, and then I came to the US for my undergraduate degree in Computer Science.
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