Chris Ward:
CLASS OF 1975
Northern Highlands Regional High SchoolClass of 1975
Allendale, NJ
New Jersey Institute of TechnologyClass of 1988
Newark, NJ
Newark College of EngineeringClass of 1988
Newark, NJ
Stevens Institute of TechnologyClass of 1979
Hoboken, NJ
Brookside Elementary SchoolClass of 1971
Allendale, NJ
Chris's Story
Life
After Highlands I went to Stevens Tech and NJIT. I program computers, now as a "computational lingust" for Franklin Electronic Publishers in Burlington, NJ. The foreign language products I produce are used in Adobe products, Sun's Star/Open Office and a number of other makers. I fence (saber), formerly at Santelli's in Englewood, then Neil Lazar in Johnson City (Near Binghamton, NY). Looking for another place near work.
School
Mostly I hung around the TV Club, which did a morning show nearly every morning when I was at Highlands. In glorious black and white, but we had a blast, and it gave us something to do instead of homeroom. We did not produce enought content looking back, but when we did it was for stuff that interested us, and when we did, we sometimes attracted flak, although I remember more for discussing J.D. Salinger than the war for some reason. Probibly because Viet-Nam was discussed all the time, and what we said was lost in the general din. We were not considered "high quality" and I seem to recall flunking the entrance interview to take the journalism classes. Ah well, I was probably meant to go to "Institutes of Technology" anyway.
I also joined the drama club and finally managed to make it onto the field in a few games senior year on the football team. Which helped to kill my interest in WATCHING football. Mostly I practiced on drill squads against the first and second string, but when you are on the field the mayhem was great to be in the middle of. That and how do you really watch a football game on TeeVee without being able to turn on the sound of Marty Glickman on the radio? Once he retired, it was like "who cares?"
College
Mostly at Stevens Tech, I sp...Expand for more
ent my time working for Dr. James M. van der Veen of the department of Chemistry. He managed to build himself an X-Ray diffractometer using nothing but undergraduates. (Sometimes late at night, you could hear the screams.) More seriously, Stevens had two Computer Science classes at the undergraduate level (E11 and T11) until the establishment of the department in 1988 (when I graduated from NJIT) but the Math, Chemistry and Physics courses were top notch. Dr. V also had us implement the Stewards XRAY76/XTAL system on the campus PDP-10 and Dr. Hockman got let me work an a Nicolet 7199 Fourier Transform Infrared Spectometer, which was a pretty damn impressive machine to an undergraduate.
I later did graduate from NJIT in Newark which did have an undergraduate computer science curriculm, and just finished (2006)my masters in Computer Science there.
Workplace
No discussion of my work can go by without my time at General Electric, which really showed me the best and worst of what business can do. They were sort of the middle (Neutron) Jack Welch years and I did get to work in the old GE building (the original one) at 570 Lexington Avenue. I got to watch the rise and fall of Kidder Peabody, the purchase of RCA/NBC and a lot of the other internal stuff and at the same time watch the communications industry (which is where I have spent most of my time) change.
Since then I have mostly worked as a consultant for various telephone companies, both wireline and wireless, and I am doing work to improve translators, grammar checkers and formatting (including hyphenation) for various foreign languages for Franklin Electronic Publishers. A bit specialized, but once you get into it, it is interesting.
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