David Thomas Eger
I grew up in Southern Delaware. My father worked for the DuPont Company as a Mechanical Engineer, doing R&D in the field of textilles and textille processes. Mom stayed home, raising us kids and slowly going nuts. They divorced in 1990 after over twenty years. It was getting pretty unpleasant the last few years, so their divorce was a Good Thing (tm).
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. Sort of odd to be as far north as Delaware, but that whole Southern Baptist Convention thing has a power of propaganda all its own. Goodness knows why I forsook religion.
When I wasn't making a water slide out of the regular slide in the back and turning the lawn into a mud field, I was back in the bike trails of Devonshire Woods. Before they bulldozed the area and put in housing, that is.
Atlanta Estates was a relatively nice place to grow up. The name sounds pretentious, and at the time it probably was - it was an upper middle class housing development a mile outside of Seaford city limits. As time went by, the wealthy folks moved into new developments like River's End. There were always a good number of DuPont families in those places -- engineers imported into the area, and my father was one of them.
I lived in a two story house with big rooms (or maybe it's just I was small). We had a back yard with gardens and an apple orchard and a grape vine and a swing set. Mom loved her gardens.
I did pretty well in school, but then the pool was small. Or maybe I was bright. In any case, I ended up with an enormous ego having taken college calculus as a high school freshman. I ran out of math I was interested in, and I looked forward to English mainly because I was in love with a girl in my Poetry class.
Biology was my favorite class in high school. Especially with the cat dissection and the botanical classification field trips. I guess I just missed not learning what the names of the trees were. Mostly, I think I enjoyed Biology so much because my teacher actually challenged me -- something sort of rare.
Anyways, I took a bunch of APs and some college courses and was bored with what was available by senior year. But thankfully, I'd found a good group of friends by then. And so I spent most of my free time bumming around with my friends from Milford.
I left Seaford for Atlanta and Georgia Tech in the fall of 1998. I entered majoring in Computer Science, but after a couple semesters I added Mathematics and became a brother of the Gamma Tau Chapter of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity. I find Algebra a fascinating subject, and have been encouraged by the community of mathematicians at Georgia Tech -- especially Nat Chaffee, Daniel Robinson, and Rena Brakebill.
While at Tech, I performed in DramaTech's productions of Faustus (Winter 1999) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Summer 1999). I also hung out in Jessica Hodgin's Animation Lab before she moved from the GVU to CMU, taking the lab with her. It's a good thing for Carnegie Mellon, as their Graphics department was getting pretty dry. Paul Heckbert is a really neat guy, but he can't do it all himself.
But as I worked in the Animation Lab, I also found myself getting more out of my Fraternity. James thought it a bit silly, but in the end it's become the most important thing in my college life. I'll admit that I never envisioned myself joining a fraternity - one of those obnoxious boys' clubs for jocks who like to drink beer and be stupid. But what I found at Psi U was a group of friends.
Psi U is a life-changing experience - one that has given me more perspective on life than elsewise I ever would have gotten during college. I've served my chapter in the roles of Co-House Manager and President (Archon). Being part of Psi U has its ups and downs, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. If you're coming to Georgia Tech, you might consider rushing - I mean, come on, free food and a chance to meet neat people.
I've also worked for two major technology companies while I've been a student at Tech - in the Spring and Summer of 2000, I worked in Hewlett-Packard's supercomputing division in Richardson, TX (formerly Convex Computer Corporation). While there, I worked on the build system for system firmware for one of their larger machines. In the summer of 2001 I participated in IBM's Extreme Blue program in Austin, TX. There, I worked on Linux device drivers for a very small PowerPC based machine.
After spending another semester at Tech, and picking up a third badass little brother, I headed off to a Budapest Semester in Mathematics for one of my most memorable Springtimes. There, I spent four months learning mathematics, and finding out why "clever Hungarian" is a redundant phrase. My classmates were virtually all going to grad school; and when we went travelling to Romania or the Czech republic, it seemed that people were always tossing about conjectures and theorems, thinking about proofs, trying to solve problem. Seeing some of the rest of the world was wonderful. Studying mathematic there was both exhilirating and humbling all at once.
After I got my Bachelor's degrees, I headed off for another stretch in Budapest as a Fulbright Scholar. Life doesn't always work as well as you wish it would, though. While there I fell out of love with mathematics and went through a painful and protracted break-up.
Mid-year was incredibly depressing and lonely time for me. For human interaction, I hacked on the Linux kernel and started a blog. I was rather ready to leave at the end of February, and ended up staying only for the presence Hà, David and Pynk.
The following year was rather better. I returned to the states, bummed around with friends and hackers all summer, and started in the Fall I moved to Pittsburgh and started in the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon. I spent my social hours dancing with the BMDL Dance Guild, and my work hours reading papers and trying to make my practical streak somehow academically interesting. It didn't work so well. I left the program in October 2005 and have been at Google ever since, where my practical streak seems much more useful.