A Quote by Jerry Yang
I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer, which I turned out to be. But I was always curious about other things too, and what if I got interested in history or the law?
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I knew I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't know what type of engineer. I chose electrical engineering primarily because it was the hardest one to get into. It's ridiculous when I think about it now, but it worked out OK.
On the law that requires women to wait twenty-four hours before they are permitted to have an abortion: I think it's a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really
wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty.
And so when I moved to IBM, I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer, but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there, though, I have to say, at the time, I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.
I always knew I wanted to be a technologist, so I went to Duke and got a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Really, I thought my goal in life was to be an inventor, a problem solver, so I thought I needed a Ph.D. to be good at inventions, but it turns out that you don't.
When I was 5 or 6 years old, I never wanted toys; I wanted electrical parts so I could build things. And I was better at taking things apart and putting them back together, but I always had extra pieces left over, so I think it was an early warning that I was a better designer than an engineer.
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
My very first records, I was very interested in how you get the particular quality you want out of it, and I began to learn about the engineering and aspects of production and things very early on. I got hands-on with the process and taught myself how to engineer, as opposed to just being a producer who asked the engineer to make it sound nice.
When I turned 21, I really wanted to go to uni, and then I thought about it and realized all I wanted was the experience. All the stuff you do in uni, I did in London, which is hang out and party with friends - but instead of getting up and going to lessons, I got up and went to work.
Even thinking back to the age of ten, I found myself more interested in sex than the other children I knew. When I saw one dog jump on top of another dog, I wanted to watch. I found it exciting; I found it stimulating. I was really curious about nudity. I was really curious about breasts. I was really curious about what was under the clothes. I'd go into the hamper and look at my mother's underwear, her conical bras.
I don't know whether I have ideas all the time. I think I'm curious about things all the time; I think I'm always curious, and I think I'm always interested in whatever passes by, and I know I tend to think about things, and I tend to talk about things, and sometimes that takes root and gives me something to chase.
I'm interested in other animals too though. There's the slug in "Mollusks", and I wrote a story about bees and one about a cat which got thrown out a window by mistake, but those never made it into the collection.
I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?
I went to Carnegie Mellon and was an electrical engineer, but electrical engineering wasn't right for me.
Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.
I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.
I'm an electrical engineer. Honestly, I think we have too many lawyers in Washington. Maybe we need some more engineers. They're trained to solve problems, and we can actually do math, which is a desperately needed skill back there.
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