The Forks in the Road

We're in the process of planning a trip this Summer to go to a relative's wedding.  Like all weddings, it will be a very important day in their lives.  We all have these important days - births, graduations, wedding, deaths, etc.  On those days, we know that our lives are changing.

But what really amazes and intrigues me are the moments where our lives change drastically, and we don't even notice it at the time.  However, later, we look back, and we recognize exactly the moment when we made a decision or learned some fact that changed the course of the rest of our life.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent the first semester of my senior year of undergrad at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  I was there as part of the "Oak Ridge Science Semester" sponsored by the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA).  At the end of the program, there was a dinner for all the participants (about 20-30 of us).  At the dinner, I happened to speak with one of the professors who was running the program there.  He was from a small GLCA college in Michigan (I forget which one).  He asked me if I was going to grad school.  I said I was, and listed the ones I was applying to.  They were all universities with top-ranked Computer Science programs (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley).  I had good grades, and my adviser at Oak Ridge had encouraged me to apply to those universities.  The professor at the dinner asked if I had considered the University of Michigan.  Being a native born Ohioan, I hadn't, of course.  I grew up supporting Ohio State.  U of M was the enemy!  But, he said they had a good robotics program, since they were so close to the automotive manufacturing plants.  I was at Oak Ridge studying robotics, so it was a logical choice.

So, when I was applying to grad schools, I applied to UM, just as a backup.  Well, it was a good thing.  All the other universities turned me down, but UM accepted me.   So, that's where I went.   

As I looked back later, I realized that one, otherwise insignificant, moment at a dinner in Tennessee where a professor decided to give some advice to a student caused the entire path of my life to change.  My life could have taken another path, but the one it took to Michigan has been wondrous.  I'm very happy with the choice.

I've had other such moments in my life - when a pretty girl smiled at me in the hallway and I smiled back, when I decided to answer an email that I could have ignored.  It's easy for me to think of these as just random events that happened to me, but the truth is, they have something in common.  Yes, the fact that they happened was random, but what is common is that I chose to act on the event.  I was open to a new possibility, and I chose to act.  While I might not have always chosen "the one less traveled by", I made the choices in my life, and I am happy where it's led me.