Happy Father's Day

When I was young, I wanted to be a baseball player. My parents signed me up for little league, and my dad volunteered to coach the team. But the dream wasn’t meant to be. By the end of the season, my hit-by-pitch count was higher than my hits — not a great sign for a future hall-of-famer.

My ideas for a career kept evolving, but my father’s support remained constant. In high school, I took an interest in jazz — maybe as a way to connect with him — so he bought me sheet music and helped workshop names for my band. Later, I took an architecture class and showed some promise. He tapped into his network and arranged a visit to a local firm. But after the visit — and a quick Google search of “architect salaries” — I quietly let that dream go.

Eventually, my attention turned to technology. I was accepted to university and started taking the prerequisites for a prestigious computer science engineering program. I applied. I was rejected.

On one visit home, my dad brought me along to a meeting with a product design firm — a place full of something called UX engineers. I vividly remember the framed drawings of computer mice they had designed for Microsoft. There wasn’t a clear academic path for this work, but I poked around and landed on Electrical Engineering. Close enough to computers, I thought.

I applied and got in. And over the next several years, I struggled. By my penultimate year, I knew I didn’t want to be an EE. But at that point, finishing seemed more valuable than starting over, so I stuck with it.

Through internships and summer jobs, I realized I liked variety — the broad scope of work that business seemed to offer. I was tempted to pivot, but thankfully my dad had once said, “Get a technical degree first. Then go into business.” That stuck with me.

So I rounded out my EE degree with one in Informatics — imaginatively flanking Computer Science. Informatics was useful to an extent, landing me my only job offer amidst the fallout of the Great Financial Crisis from a career fair the department held. But it certainly wasn’t my passion. But to this day, I still don’t know how much that engineering degree helped me. Maybe it taught me how to push through failure — like retaking Advanced Calculus after flunking it the first time. Maybe it taught systems thinking — how to trace problems through a circuit, a chunk of code, or a state model.

But now, writing this, I realize the real lessons were about my dad. That he wasn’t as hard-nosed as he let on, softening his strict financial rules and continuing to cover my room and board when he saw how much I was struggling. And that — no matter how often I changed direction — he kept showing up with curiosity, encouragement, and quiet belief. He never even suggested I quit Little League despite my poor batting.

I was lucky to have two parents, each of whom had bigger dreams for me than I ever had for myself — and yet still supported the dreams I did have. But on this Father’s Day, I’m thinking especially of my dad, who always said I’d grow up to be “smarter, stronger, and better looking than him.” Two out of three isn’t bad.