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Back in the '70s when my friends in California were at Berkeley, in-state tuition was around $700 a year.
Sometimes I can think of nothing more blissful than going to Berkeley and reading Byron for three years.
I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
My sister is a good story of resiliency. She had a full ride at UC Davis, but she left school to go to the Philippines - and then she decided to go back to school in her 40s, which surprised me. She went to UC Berkeley, and I think she was one of two African Americans in her class at Haas. She's really impressive.
I really appreciate the many neighbourhoods of Berkeley. There is still the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. And it has the University of California, which is the greatest gift, to my mind, to be close to it. It keeps the place alive.
When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.
It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987.
At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists.