Happy 2007 everyone! I have a good vibe about the upcoming year and I’ve been working a lot on planning and strategy to get things off to a good start. We have a lot of exciting things coming up and I’m anxious to hit some of the lofty goals we’ve set (more on that in a later post).
All of this planning made me think about the movie Run Lola Run, where fate leads the main character to three different outcomes based on slightly different breakpoints in each storyline. I have experienced several major breakpoints in my life and have often wondered how things would be different:
Breakpoint #1: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
This was almost my address for college. I had never visited RPI, but was advised that it was one of the best technical colleges in the country, behind only MIT and Cal Tech. They also had a great hockey team, so it would feel like home.
I applied and was accepted into the mathematics degree program, but decided I really wanted to be an engineer and that the cost was too high. I ended up enrolled at the University of North Dakota in their aeronautical engineering program instead of RPI and the much more interesting Hudson River Valley.
There was another college breakpoint at UND–what if I had begun the flight training program there instead of transferring to the University of Wisconsin to study banking and finance (like my grandfather before me)? I probably couldn’t have afforded to become a pilot either, but going to Madison did get me closer to my future wife. (more…)
