When I was struggling to find a foothold in research after completing all my coursework, I visited my friend and classmate Sri in Nashville. He is a civil engineer, who finished his master’s degree in structural engineering at Vanderbilt a year or two earlier and had been working for a small civil engineering consulting firm in Nashville. He showed me around town. From time to time, he would point to a building and say “I designed this.” I was thoroughly impressed. At the time, I was working full-time as a software specialist at Math Faculty Computing Facility at the University of Waterloo, helping to develop software to support the thousands of unix systems (of a dozen different processor/OS combinations!) on campus, long before the notion of “software packages” became a thing. Many researchers at UWaterloo were served by the software I contributed to. But I aspired to have the kind of impact Sri could point to.
I ended up going to IBM Research in Switzerland for my doctoral research, and then continued on to Nokia Research Center, which was doing exciting world-changing work in the heyday of the mobile phone revolution. Today, I could point to your phone and say “The stuff I designed is on your phone.”
I am a child of teachers. While I grew up, I was able to see how even small things that my parents did could touch the lives of their students and lead to tremendous positive change. Being able to point to a phone and say “my stuff is in there,” is one thing, but being able to point to a person and say “I helped a tiny bit to make this person who they are today,” is on an entirely different level. Even after my parents retired, it was touching to see middle-aged men and women making it a point to visit or get in touch with my parents to tell them how they changed their lives.
This was perhaps the most important reason that made me become an academic when I decided to leave Nokia in 2012.
Recently, I was sent a clip from from a conversation with the eminent gynecologist Sir (Dr.) Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, who was a student at Jaffna Central College where my father was a teacher. My father taught physics at the school and was instrumental in setting up basketball not only at Jaffna Central, but in the entire Northern province of Sri Lanka (as co-founder of the Northern Province Basketball Association who served as its secretary for several years in the 1960s). Sir Sabaratnam’s kind words about my father, even sixty years after their their interactions at Jaffna Central, reminded me again why being a teacher is so rewarding. Here is the clip.
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