I tried one last thing before we left BYU. Along the way, I had heard of a new field called Biomedical Engineering. It was brand new and hardly any school was offering it. I had always wanted to be a doctor, but since I faint at the sight of blood, it didn’t seem like a good fit. But to use engineering in the medical field seemed like a match made in heaven. The University of Utah was one of just a couple schools in the country that had a graduate Biomedical Engineering program. So, I sent off my application for Master’s Degree work at the U of U. If I had been accepted, our lives would have been greatly different than they were. But, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I was not accepted.
That left IBM. So, we took the job in New Jersey and off we went. School was done and once again we were starting a new chapter in our lives. Coming to BYU, we were three. Now we were four. On my trip to New Jersey, I had found a little two-bedroom house that was for sale and we felt like we could afford. I called my mother and she agreed to loan us the down payment and so we moved into our first home in Hopatcong, New Jersey. Our new home was just a block or so from Hopatcong lake and we had private rights to use the little beach. It’s too bad we could never afford a boat or we might have really had some fun.
A footnote to the story about applying to U of U for graduate school: I was pretty bummed out when I didn’t get accepted. It took me a few months to really get over it. I don’t take rejection very well. It was a year or two later that I had some reason to communicate with the head of the Engineering Department at the University of Utah. I don’t remember why, but I wrote to him and asked him straight out why I had not been accepted. It was something that always bugged me and I wanted to know. He was very kind. He sent me back a nice letter. He said that the Biomedical course was very new and they were only accepting three new graduate students each year. He told me that the year I applied, they had received 36 applications and I had ranked number 6. Since they had only accepted 3, I missed the cut by 3. Well, I felt a lot better. Number 6 out of 36 is not too bad. And, I wonder where I’d be today if I had been accepted. Probably working as a professor for the University of Utah.
Dad
Things happen for a reason. Pretty cool though that you did rank so high Dad!!