Salad Days

As I was reading through various different company and market reports today, I was struck by how many Vice Presidents there are for each CEO. Subsequently, I realized that I haven’t actually met any active CEOs of publicly traded companies in the past 10 years. But I did, 12 years ago, meet the then-CEO of Texas Instruments.

It was part of the now-defunct National Alliance of Excellence scholarship, which I saw randomly and applied to. In addition to some small scholarship amount (either $2k or $5k), it also offered the opportunity to try to arrange a meeting with anyone of my choice. At the time, I was still a ECE major at Caltech, and was thinking about a career in electronics/circuit design. So I asked to meet Thomas Engibous, the CEO of Texas Instruments. At the time, I had no idea about market caps or technology development; I simply had been using Texas Instruments calculators for something like 8 years, and thought it would be good to check out the company.

To my surprise, the National Alliance of Excellence actually managed to arrange a half-day meeting between me and Mr. Engibous. So I flew down to Dallas, had breakfast with the National Alliance of Excellence organizers, and then chatted with Thomas about my studies at Caltech and my career aspirations. He then offered me an summer internship on the spot, and introduced me to one of his up-and-coming engineers to be my supervisor for the summer. I accepted immediately.

I headed back to Caltech, and then started in Erik’s lab as an undergrad researcher in the second semester of 2001, and liked it a lot — but only about as much as the prospect of the TI internship. I was torn between my two options. But, sad (and embarassing!) to say, what decided for me wasn’t a decision about which field to work in — it was simply because I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of trying to arrange for summer housing in Dallas (remember, this was back before the days of Craigslist).

Being utterly immature at the time, I delayed and delayed the decision until my agreed start date at TI, and I got a “No Show” email from the up-and-coming engineer. Having burnt that bridge, I then buckled down and got to work on DNA biomolecular engineering.

Thinking back upon it now, that was probably one of the biggest opportunities I botched due to being green in judgement. It’s not that I regret having joined my current field, but rather that I should have handled the situation much better. If I had informed TI in a graceful and timely manner, then perhaps that connection would have stayed warm, and I’d be making integrated device in vitro diagnostics now.