Max at College

In August 1988, I packed up my 1977 Datsun B210 and drove from Hillsboro to Berkeley, California to start my first year as an undergraduate. I went down the week before classes started with the plan to go through rush.

I arrived at the Ida Sproul dorms on Monday morning to move into my triple-occupancy dorm room. I met my new roommates Sean and Fabiano, who were both really nice. I learned later that Sean and I were chosen to be in the same dorm room because he was a Dead Head and I had listed Led Zeppelin as my favorite band; I'm not sure I would consider that an indication of a good fit, but we all got along very well. My dorm room had a great view of San Francisco, but it was very cramped. I slept on a bunk bed above my desk, and I was somewhat paranoid about falling off in the middle of the night.

My first day I also ran into a woman on my dorm floor who needed help moving up a refrigerator to her room. I don't remember the interaction very well, but this was the first time I met Joann. Later in the week I introduced myself to her as I was meeting everyone on the floor.

I spent a couple days going through the motions of checking out fraternities, but it really wasn't my thing. I ended up doing a lot of partying with a group of guys who were essentially squatting in a fraternity; they were eventually kicked out of the house.

At some point during my senior year in high school, I had decided that I wanted to try rowing in college. My paternal grandfather had rowed at Cal as a freshman, and my father tried it for a couple weeks at Cornell. I remember calling up the coach and asking about the program, and he in turn asked me about my sports background and my physique. At the time I weighed 225, and being only 5'11", I really wasn't the ideal candidate for the crew; I remember muffled laughter in the background as the coach relayed my information to someone in the office. Not willing to be discouraged, I attended the informational meeting and planned to attend the first practice on the Monday that classes started.

When I started college, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do in terms of a career. I planned the first two years of classes to be consistent with three potential majors: physics, math, and computer science. My first semester I took a particularly difficult calculus class (I had already studied calculus at Cornell and in high school, so I figured I could handle it), an introductory computer science class, and an introductory physics class. With the extra unit of credit for rowing, this was just enough to qualify as full time.

My first semester was by far the hardest. I didn't know how to study efficiently, and I ended up spending enormous amounts of time in the library. I had also fallen in love with Joann, and my attempts to court her added more complexity to my life. For example, I worked very hard to "accidentally" brush my teeth at the same time as Joann so that I could see her often. Rowing was a big help as a way to relieve all the stress.

At the end of my first semester, I returned to Hillsboro for Christmas break, and then drove back with my mom who had accepted a new job in the Bay Area. I decided to move into a boarding house for the second semester because I've always liked to have my own space. The boarding house was the nastiest place in which I have ever lived. I had a tiny room on the bottom floor, with no control over the temperature. There were cockroaches everywhere, and I don't think the shared bathroom was ever cleaned. My room was inevitably too hot, so I kept my window open at night, which opened up to a scary alley behind the building. My room was frequently burglarized, and one night someone reached into my open window and stole my computer monitor while I slept less than 4 feet away. Despite all this, I was glad to have my own room.

By March, Joann and I were (finally) dating officially, and I had made the freshman boat on the crew. I learned how to study more efficiently, and I was able to handle my classes a lot easier than in the previous semester.

After completing my first year at Cal, I decided to stay in Berkeley for the summer to take some classes. I took a computer science class (data structures and C programming) and a rhetoric class that was my second of two required English classes; quite to my surprise, the rhetoric class wasn't too awful. The summer was fun, and I made a trip to San Diego to stay with Joann. I met for the first time Joann's sister Christine, her father Ed, and Christine's then-boyfriend (now-husband) Brent. I had met Joann's mother Karen when I was first in the dorms, but I hadn't remembered her very well.

At the end of the summer, I moved into a fraternity as a boarder. The room was bigger and safer than at the boarding house, and the bathrooms were even cleaned occasionally (although Joann refused to use them). During my sophomore year at Cal, I continued to row on the crew and to get better as a student. Joann and I spent a lot of time together, and we both have very pleasant memories of our evening walks to the music library to study, followed by hot chocolate at the coffee house. After the first semester of my second year at Cal, I moved out of the fraternity and into the top floor of a house in Berkeley, where I had my own bathroom! The new living arrangement worked out really well until I got into a fight with the woman who owned the house ("Crazy Shirley"), and from then on it was difficult.

By the end of my second year, I decided that I wanted to major in computer science. Out of all the classes I had been taking, I enjoyed the computer classes the most, and I decided that it was the most practical major in terms of finding a job.

During the summer of 1990, I went to New York with the crew to compete in a regatta, and when I returned I moved out of Crazy Shirley's house and into Joann's boarding house until I could find my own place. Reasonable housing in Berkeley was particularly difficult to find because of rent control. I ended up spending a couple hundred dollars as a bribe to a "housing locator" in order for her to introduce me to the manager of an apartment building that might be having a vacancy. I ended up getting a really nice one-bedroom apartment that was two blocks from campus, and my initial rent was $250 per month. This was a ridiculously small amount due to the rent control, and a similarly placed apartment at UCLA would, as I would later find out, easily rent for five times that amount.

That summer I got a job working for a hippie gardener in Berkeley. We would drive around the Berkeley hills to enormous houses, and she would plant things while I did grunt work such as weeding and hauling bags around. It turned out that I was really good (compared to my peers) at leaf blowing, and once the gardener had figured that out it became my most frequent task.

When I started my junior year at Cal in the fall of 1990, I had gotten most of my core classes out of the way, and I had a lot more flexibility to pick and choose some really fun classes. I ended up enrolling in three reasonably challenging computer-science classes and a music class ("clapping for credit"); when combined with my rowing, this was my heaviest load so far in terms of credits. It also turned out to be one of the most fun.

Rowing got off to the usual start of long, steady rows and the handful of fall head races. One morning in October during practice my head started itching really bad. It got to the point where for the duration of each piece, I was thinking only of how much I wanted it to be over so I could scratch my head. When I got home, Joann suggested that I probably had chicken-pox; I headed to the hospital to get checked out, and Joann was indeed correct. It was a real bummer because I had been hoping to go to the Head of the Charles the following weekend, which is a big-deal head race in Boston, but I was now quarantined until I got better.

For my second semester of my junior year, I took a lighter load because of racing season. My favorite class was one on the theory of NP-completeness. I got it in my head that I could show that P=NP with a polynomial-time algorithm for solving Hamiltonian path, and I spent hours on the problem. I also got interested in some other (less difficult) theoretical computer-science problems, and I started working with some graduate students of the professor who was teaching the NP-completeness class.

That spring I also took a class on the history of Eastern Europe. This was my first history class, and I had little interest in the subject, but it was taught by a professor who was known to be a lot of fun and who was rumored to be friendly to athletes. The first day the class was packed, and because I had not officially enrolled in the class yet, I was concerned about whether or not I could get in. When I approached the professor about my concern, he said that there definitely wasn't any room for me. He asked me what my name was, and he lit up when he heard Chickering. He asked, "Are you related to Roger Chickering?", and when I told him that indeed I was, he let me in the class. I had for the first (and only) time benefited from what is apparently an historians old-boys network! The class turned out to be great fun.

Somewhere towards the end of the spring semester I decided that I wanted to learn about artificial intelligence. I asked my theory-class professor whom I should talk to, and he introduced me to Stuart Russell, who at that point was doing some research in search algorithms. In particular, he had developed a new game-tree search algorithm that had shown promise in the game of Othello, and he had a graduate student working to implement it in chess. I was very interested in the problem, and I spent the summer of 1991 working in his group.

Joann graduated with a degree in chemistry in the spring, and she decided to go to UCLA for graduate school in chemistry. I was really unhappy that she was leaving, but I was confidant that we could continue our relationship apart.

The fall semester started, and I managed to stay healthy through the Head of the Charles. There was also a head race in Newport Beach, which is about an hour away from where Joann was living in Los Angeles. I ended up staying with Joann the night before the race, and somehow I got confused about what time I needed to get up. We woke up, looked at the schedule, and realized that I was supposed to be at the race in five minutes. We jumped in the car and sped to Newport, and we arrived right as my boat was getting ready to launch. To this day, I have stress dreams about that morning.

That fall, I started to stress about what I was going to do once I graduated. My brother Roger had moved to the Bay Area and was working for Silicon Graphics, and I thought it would be a whole lot of fun to go work with him. I also thought about going to graduate school, but I was mostly interested in this option as a means of putting off my decision of what to do.

When I started my last semester, I only needed to take two more classes to graduate. Because it was racing season once again, I opted to take the minimum course load in order to concentrate on rowing. By the end of the school year, I had decided to join Joann in Los Angeles and I enrolled in graduate school in computer science at UCLA.

Before heading off to school, Roger and I flew to Germany where my father was doing some research, and we spent two weeks traveling around. We had a great time going for hikes during the day and drinking beer at night.