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College Admissions Essay: Bejamin Coming To California

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I’m from Syracuse, New York and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts with a degree in physics. Immediately after graduating, I accepted an offer from Westinghouse because it was a management training program which promised to expose me to several engineering opportunities and allow me to choose the one I liked best. So I went to work at Westinghouse in Youngwood, Pennsylvania in the semiconductor business. In that job, I was setting up a wafer fab operation and making simple semiconductor products like transistors and diodes. A friend of mine came out to California a year before I did. He told his girlfriend’s roommate, “I’ve got the perfect guy for you.” So I came out to California in October of 1962. I had no intention in joining Fairchild when I came out. From my imprecise research I had determined that Mountain View was in Southern California and I wasn’t interested. We were staying in Sausalito and one day we decided to drive to Santa Cruz. I was asleep in the car and woke up just as we came to the Mountain View sign and Fairchild. So I found out where Mountain View was. Some people plan their whole career out very carefully. I guess mine was determined by waking up at the right time. …show more content…

All of a sudden, I was free of the many social constraints of the East Coast and could fashion my life in the way I saw fit. Within nine months, I had a new house, wife, job, car, and child on the way. I refer to it as my early career epiphany. Westinghouse had been full of structure and I could see my career unfolding slowly before me, one agonizing preprogrammed promotion at a time. At Fairchild my progress was limited only by my talents and ability to work hard. It was a complete meritocracy. It was intimidating, but I survived, even if it was scary at

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