Stewart L. Palmer – 50th Reunion Essay

Stewart L. Palmer

333 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

stewart@stewartpalmer.com

212-249-4600

Spouse(s): Priscilla Coker (2012)

Education: Yale University, BA, 2014

National Service: DP2, US Navy, ’67–’71

Career: Principal Programmer, Sperry Univac (St. Paul, MN) 1971–1978; 33 years at IBM finishing as Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research in 2012; Undergraduate History major, Yale College, 2012–2014; Four years Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, L.P. Current status: Happily working.

Avocations: Competitive sailing, sailboat race management, croquet

College: Saybrook

I remember a deep despair that I felt in the spring of my sophomore year in 1967 that I would ever amount to anything or find personal happiness.

I now look back on a very successful career and I have a life that is filled not just with happiness but with continuing wonder and joy.

It took a long time to get here and I am thrilled that I did.

With horrible grades and a deep sense that I was in the wrong place, I dropped out of Yale at the end of my sophomore year. Even after taking what we called the “War Boards” (Selective Service Qualification Test) for two years, I gave absolutely no thought to what might happen to my student draft deferment if I left Yale.

I escaped the draft by enlisting in the navy, spending two years on the staff of the Naval War College in Newport and two years writing computer programs in a group run by then Captain Grace Hopper in Washington, DC.

The discipline of the navy turned my life around and taught me, for the first time in my life, the value of hard work.

Having discovered and fallen in love with computers the summer before my freshman year, I created a very successful career as a software engineer. I was a complete autodidact and became almost certainly the first and only senior technical staff member at IBM Research without an undergraduate degree.

But I still felt a deep sense of loss for never having completed Yale. I considered myself a failure for not finishing and I shunned all the reunions.

In the fall of 2010, I met a delightful woman roughly my age who had graduated from college only six years before. “If she can do that, why can’t I?” I wrote Yale to ask if I could return. They could not have been more welcoming.

In the summer of 2012, I married the delightful Priscilla Coker and started classes at Yale Summer Session five days later. Yale readmitted me to the class of 2014 and my new bride and I spent a wonderful two years in New Haven.

After a 90-term leave of absence, I was ready for Yale and my two years there were fascinating, transformative, and, at times, terrifying in those occasional moments when I thought I might not make it to the end. I never, for a moment, imagined how much work it was going to be or how open and welcoming my classmates a third my age would be.

The combination of marriage and a second chance at Yale has transformed me. I awake each morning with a sense of joy that I am married to such an amazing person and a sense of wonder and gratitude that I have a job that I find both rewarding and immensely enjoyable.