Accomplishments

I suspect there are very few people who respond to a diagnosis of a terminal illness with a short prognosis any different than I am. There are two things I spend considerable time doing: Thinking about what I will not be able to eddo. My mother died at a young age, as old as I am now. And I had an uncle who died ten years younger. Ever since I got married I always thought about the parts of my life my mother never got to see. Now I think about my children’s futures. Although they are in a much better position than I was when my mother died. I still want to dance at their weddings and hold (if there are any) grand children. More importantly was the time I would spend in retirement with Rhonda. I can go on and on about the things and places I wanted to go with her. That is probably my biggest disappointment. Where do I go from here? I really don’t know. Hopefully the legacy left for my children and wife will preserve the memory of who I was. All I hope is that I am remembered as caring, loving thoughtful husband, parent, brother, and friend. The ways my wife and children respond to me lead me to believe that those hopes are valid. Also the fact that I have friendships that have lasted over 40 years tells me that my evaluation of myself is valid. I certainly am not going to list all of my positive characteristics. What I do want to do is to reflect on my accomplishments.

I certainly was not the student in high school or college that made my parent proud. Even my athletic abilities were minimal until I started paying basketball as a high school senior, but that wasn’t anything my parents were interested. I really am not sure there was anything I accomplished that they bragged about, although there were things they certainly could have.
My children are certainly at the top of my list but I certainly cannot take complete credit for that but according to Rhonda, I was the major influence on their development. I cannot accept that.
When you work at a university it is difficult to see that receiving a Ph.D. in a research discipline is a major accomplishment. I don’t recall the percentage of the population that has a Ph.D. and the percentage of people who start Ph.D. programs actually complete their dissertation
Actual accomplishments. My first “real” job was working for GE, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin where I managed the team that was designing the computer interface for the next generation submarine system. On the surface this may not seem like a big deal but we brought those systems to the computer age with digital color displays. In fact the design standards and conventions we developed for that system was adopted as the Navy standard. Our work also resulted in the Navy making Human-Computer Interaction an integral component of all their designs. In addition to receiving a General Manager’s award for my work on the proposal for that project, The Navy pointed out that the HCI design was one of the significant strengths of our proposal.
I certainly cannot compare any of those accomplishments to what I have done as an educator. What stands out most is something that took place at the end of my first year back in academia. I taught a core lab course (Cognition) that was required for a psychology major. After graduation, one of the students from that class took me around to meet her entire extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. She was the first, not only to graduate from a college, but to attend college. Seeing how proud her family was of her, touched me in ways I have never been affected again.