Letter from the real world: EECS major Tobin Fricke

by Tobin Fricke
Geneva, Switzerland, June 12, 2003

EECS major Tobin Fricke graduated last May, poised to enter the real world. Through a series of letters from abroad, Forefront will stay in touch with Tobin as his life after Berkeley unfolds. PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO

The notion that I was leaving Berkeley didn’t hit me until I came home to my co-op to find all my stuff tossed out of my room and into the hallway. I didn’t take move-out day seriously, but I suppose I should have known that someone would be moving into my room at Oscar Wilde house.

It really was time to leave Berkeley, say goodbye to my friends, return my keys and turn in my LBNL badge, get those last timecards signed and head out. Eager promises to visit, write, and return to live in Berkeley next year made it all a little easier.

On the way to my summer internship in Europe, I stayed in a suburb of Boston with a friend just back from two years in Beijing. He told me about class systems and cultural quirks, adventures learning Mandarin, and about SARS. I told him about socialism in Sweden, about the plight of the Russians in Estonia, about popular opinion in Israel and hospitality in Jordan. This summer is the last of a series of summer research programs that have taken me to Sweden, Alaska, and Israel during my college breaks.

I’m now in Switzerland, working at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Every day there’s a morning of advanced lectures on modern physics, an afternoon working on the test beam, where we’re building an electron calorimeter, and an evening socializing with students from all over the world. Sometimes we make excursions to Lake Geneva or the mountains nearby.

But the other day I was thinking back to Berkeley, about one of the departmental commencement ceremonies I attended last semester, where a student speaker remarked on the subject of the real world. Bound for a Ph.D. program, and then maybe a professorship, he said he doubted he’d ever enter that real world. Sometimes I feel the same way.

And then there’s another real world, where my parents and my friends' parents are out of work, and my friends with fancy EECS, math, and physics degrees are working as bank tellers, collection agency callers, telemarketers, actuaries, a programmer for an insurance company. Someone here told me he supplements his income by babysitting. I don’t think this is what they dreamed of. Our commencement speakers belabored the point that things are much worse now than when we started college. Maybe so, but I refuse to believe it.

I don’t really have a sense of being "out there" yet. I still measure the year in semesters and I’m trying to figure out whether I’ll return to Berkeley "next semester" and sit in on a math and language class, or stay at CERN. Then there’s working with the Red Cross in the Middle East or pursuing one of my dreams to spend a few months working at the South Pole.

I think opportunity still lurks for those who can and are willing to chase after it. Being young and unattached has its benefits.

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