Every year I was in school, I studied math. Fortunately, my school, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, offered advanced-placement calculus to seniors. So, instead of learning calculus in a class of a hundred or more college freshmen, I was in a class of fewer than 30 high school seniors, with an enthusiastic teacher.

After high school, I went to Rice University in Houston, Texas. Since I grew up in Houston and lived in Baton Rouge for only my last two years of high school, going to Rice was an odd mixture of leaving home for college and going back home to Houston. At Rice, I was not expected to declare a major until my junior year, so I studied science and engineering. In my sophomore year, I took an accounting course—and loved it. Since I thought that modern accountants must surely need to know a lot about computers, I decided to major in accounting and minor in computer science.

In the middle of my sophomore year, I really left home, by transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. There I took another accounting course and an introductory Pascal programming class. This time, the accounting was exceedingly boring, probably because the teacher was uninspired. The Pascal class, on the other hand, was very fun and easy. I loved it, so I forgot about accounting and majored in computer science instead.