Joshua Seth Auerbach – 50th Reunion Essay

Joshua Seth Auerbach

129 Holmes Road

Ridgefield, CT 06877

joshuaauerbachwatson@gmail.com

203-431-3876

Spouse(s): Jessica Schwartz Auerbach (1969 – )

Child(ren): Sarah Auerbach (1974); Eliza Jones (1977)

Grandchild(ren): Audrey Nelson (2003); Caleb Nelson (2005); Kai Jones (2010); Sabine Jones (2013)

Education: Yale Ph.D (1977) Psychology

Career: Systems Programmer and Manager, Yale Computer Center, 1978-1983. Research Staff Member, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 1983-2016

Avocations: Music (classical, bassoonist), hiking

College: Jonathan Edwards

There are three strands to my life since Yale: family, career, and music (my chief hobby). Yale is implicated in all of them.

Family is easiest to explain. Jessica Schwartz, Vassar, 1969, is still my wife. We married a week after graduation. We met on a blind date arranged by mutual friends (another Yale/Vassar couple, who sadly didn’t stay married as long as us). We hung out at Yale and Vassar almost exclusively until our honeymoon on Martha’s Vineyard added a third place of significance.

Parenthood was the best thing that happened to me in my life. Both my daughters were born at Yale New Haven Hospital while I was in grad school at Yale. I carried my daughter Sarah on my back when I went in to my office to work on my thesis, and I amused her by walking around the Peabody Museum with her looking over my shoulder at the “monkey faces, monkey bones.” I took my younger daughter, Eliza, to work with me sometimes at the Yale Computer Center. Eliza ended up going to Yale Med school (class of 2004), which renewed my connection to Yale after 21 years away from it.

Music is also easy to explain. At Yale, I played the bassoon. I was in the concert band and was a founding member of what became the Yale Symphony. The concert band’s tour of Europe in the summer of 1968 represented my first trip to that continent and was one of the most exciting months of my life. In grad school and while working for Yale I played in the New Haven Civic Orchestra and when I moved to IBM I started playing in the Putnam Symphony and joined a woodwind quintet in which I’m still a member. Now I play in the Danbury Community Orchestra and am constantly organizing chamber music groups to play in, as well as attending the Bennington Chamber Music Conference every summer.

Now, how to explain how Yale is implicated in my career? It’s complicated. At Yale I majored in psychology. After graduation, I taught special education for two years to avoid the draft. Actually, my draft board never bought that and it was the lottery that saved me, but, in any case I returned to Yale in 1971 as a grad student in psych. That’s why my daughters were born there and grew up on the Yale campus. In 1977, when I got my PhD, there were no jobs so I worked for Yale as a computer programmer until 1983. I was by then in love with programming and went to work for IBM, where I stayed until retirement in 2016. With 18 years at Yale and 33 at IBM, I like to say I must love the color blue. Really, I think Yale taught me that everyone makes their own course through life: the past justifies itself by leading to the present.