My tenure at the University of Houston was a marriage between chance and opportunity. It wasn't even on my list of places to go until the time to choose drew near, but once it made it on to the list it shot to the forefront pretty quickly.

When I was a kid, I figured I'd go to UT like my father did. When it came time for my brother to choose a college our house was inundated with material as they explored every possible option, in the end going to UT just like we'd all pretty much predicted. Since David went to UT to become an engineer like Dad, I didn't have to.

One of the materials to help him choose a college was a program for our Apple ][e computer. Not really knowing where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do, I ran through option after option trying to figure out what college best suited every concievable thing that I might've wanted to do when I grew up. Two options near the top of the list were Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University.

I figured "Hey, neat, colleges in Texas that aren't UT & AM. I wanna go to one of these places!"

Mom and Dad rather forcefully explained that private colleges were out of the question. "Harrumph," I thought, "they just don't care about my education."

Seeing that I was upset, Mom reneged a bit. Or at least seemed to. "If you can give me one thing that those universities offer that a public one doesn't, then you can go there."

Of course they couldn't, which was the point. I was still sure that Mom and Dad just didn't love me enough to sink ten grand a year in tuition so that I could go where I wanted to go, but I quickly moved on from the computer program to a big giant book.

Since cost was so darn important to them, I swept through and wrote down all the cheapest colleges I could find. When I finally determined that I was going to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I skipped up to Mom and gave her the news. I'm sure she explained about out-of-state tuition and so on, but one thing I remember her saying was "If you just want to find a cheap college, take a look at the University of Guam. You could probably even get a scholarship there."

So then it was settled. I was going to the University of Guam and if I worked hard enough, I might get a scholarship. It was the "working hard" bit that got me, along with thinking that there were more important things in my thirteen year old world than figuring out where I was going to college.

I went to a high school with a population that hovered around 4,000 students. By the time I was looking for college, the notion of a university with 40,000 students was wholly unappealing.

So I started looking at Texas's third-tier colleges. I still didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was leaning towards teaching and Stephen F. Austin and Southwest Texas both had good teaching programs, so I started looking in to those. As I started settling in with the family's brand-spanking-new ACER 486/50 computer, I started developing an unfortunate affection for technology that lead me to start thinking that maybe I'd prefer do that as well.

Dad took me to see the SFA campus, which I thought was nice. I also went to see a college up near Waco called Texas State Technical Institute which had good two-year degree programs. I liked the campus just fine and the computer nerds and hippies there seemed right up my alley, but once I determined that my high school was actually bigger than that college, I started to rethink my "small school" idea and started looking at bigger universities.

It was just as well. Once I became more interested in pursuing a technology-related matter, I discovered that big universities were better in that regard anyway. There was some question as to whether or not I'd be able to get in to UT or A&M, so I looked at other big universities, too.

An entire family of family friends had gone to Texas Tech, which had made its way towards the top of the list. I also had a good friend who was trying to convince me to go to Louisiana State University. It was out-of-state, but the tuitions were dirt-low to the point that it didn't really even cost that much more to go there.

I'd remembered what Mom said about having to justify paying more so I looked heavily into LSU's computer programs and found them lacking (they had a CS major and MIS specialty). Luckily, sort-of, Texas Tech's was lacking even more (all they had that I could find was MIS).

About the same time, I was becoming friends with a guy I'd met off ACME BBS named Adam. Adam was a more academically accomplished fellow than I was and he'd chosen to go to the University of Houston.

I'd never really considered UH for a number of reasons. First of all, I knew practically nothing about it. Second of all, it had a reputation for being academically forgiving to the point that it had earned the nickname "Cougar High."

So I found it interesting that Adam had decided to take his good grades there.

Also around that time I met a girl named Anna during a summer job that I had. Anna struck me as quite intelligent at the get-go. It turned out that she was going to UH as well. They were both involved with the Honors College there.

The recruiters were hitting Clear Lake pretty hard and the UH rep was really good. Unlike Texas and A&M, he didn't require an auditorium and I was able to ask him several questions. When he explained that there was an entire college at UT dedicated to technology, I was just about sold. When I saw the wonderful campus (which I'd wrongly imagined being kind of dingy), I was only going through the motions with the other universities.

I applied at Texas A&M to see if I could get in and was put on the deferred list for a semester. I didn't bother applying at Texas Tech because they had strict numerical criteria which I just barely passed. LSU was out of the running since UH could offer everything it could and then some.

Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't mention that there were other factors. First of all, that co-worker named Anna became my serious girlfriend. Secondly, I was really getting used to Houston and wasn't particularly thrilled at the prospect of leaving. UH was a good opportunity to get out of the house without going off to college. It was the best of both worlds.

There are times I wish I had more traditional university memories, which UH did not really provide. Yet because of its non-traditional demographics, it really offered the students many of the benefits of a smaller university. It wasn't hard to get involved with student government (which I didn't) or the school paper for instance (which I wrote for over three years). It also had the benefits of a larger university, with a Division I-A football team that twice came away with 7-4 records (the other seasons? We won't go there).

If I had it all to do over again, I'd still be a Cougar.