avatarBethKanell

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Mine’s FORTRAN, His Was COBOL, and Theirs Is … C++?

Chemist (FORTRAN) + Coder. Hearts and rings.

1969: There’s nothing as romantic as carrying yours-and-mine boxes of punched cards to a table in the dormitory common room to debug your programs side by side. Check YES or NO.

I was 17, and I checked MAYBE … because I already had the most romantic piece of paper I could imagine in my hands: My boyfriend, in the first term of college (Michigan State), turned over one of his big pages of output, with the sprocket holes on either side and wrote out the words and guitar cords to a folk song I adored, so I could learn to play it, too. Total contrast: coding (although we called it programming then) and love song.

“Computer programming” was DDD’s major; mine was chemistry. To complete my degree, I needed a great grade in FORTRAN. The program chemists were using at that point. (Not a problem. The grade or the program.) After a term of writing DO loops and printing out data charts, I focused more on maneuvering experiments in the nitrogen-filled glovebox (so the niobium involved wouldn’t deteriorate) and adjusting the programming controls on a VARIAN spectrometer that performed EPR, that is, electron paramagnetic resonance, to reveal whether my lab mates and I had developed our intended new compounds.

Still, it felt like we had a lot in common at the time, and we respected each other’s specialties. So by the time we graduated in 1972, we’d done a quick rose-garden marriage, with my senior lab partner performing the ceremony “in the name of the Universe,” and we headed to New Jersey’s haven of manufacturing, and hence research, to lean on my folks a bit and pick up our first jobs.

DDD snagged his first job working at Bell Labs. I held out until I found a slot at Lever Brothers Research, where there was a VARIAN spectrometer just one model up from the one I already adored. In the evenings, Don spread sheets of COBOL across the length of the hallway in our apartment, and I helped him debug his coding — easy enough to spot extra spaces that shouldn’t be there or unusual formats he should check. I'm sorry to say that he wasn’t interested in my chemistry, though.

Spoiler alert: The marriage folded. As you might guess, someone who wanted to talk chemistry eventually came along (and he, too, could play guitar).

But here I am, decades later, still doing chemistry and sometimes talking coding … because I ended up with a tech son. He codes in C++, which I don’t try to debug. But try me on planning the architecture of a new app, and I’m there for you.

So, without the romance maybe, the career path I’ll diagram for you in the coming articles shows how a chemist became a mom, then a grandma (yeah!), and never stopped doing science. Or fighting for equity. Along the way, I am having life-changing adventures and becoming a published writer.

To quote a Fortran program:

PROGRAM MyCareer

do some fun here

END PROGRAM MyCareer

Except it hasn’t ended at all!

How did the next-gen start… do those dots look like code to you?
Coding
STEM
Chemistry
Career Advice
Programming
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