Mentors-John Uyemura

John Uyemura and I met under the most awkward of circumstances. He was an associate professor at Georgia Tech when I was a graduate Teaching Assistant

I taught an electric motors lab section that met late in the afternoon/early evening, when most of the people in the building had left for the day. I brought in a radio to while away the time in the lab and to keep the students entertained. The students in my section loved it and I got to be the cool TA. John barged into the lab one afternoon with a full head of steam and reading me the riot act for playing the radio too loud and disturbing his late lecture, that was how we met. It was an inauspicious start to our friendship.

John had a reputation as being one of the most intense and hard-core professors at the electrical engineering department. He was the hotshot young professor, specializing in burgeoning area of integrated circuit design and manufacturing, and was instrumental in getting the chip fabrication lab funded and built when the ECE department put in the facility.

He was so intense and demanding that he was both feared and admired by students because he was a relentless perfectionist. Praise from John Uyemura was a badge of honor amongst both the undergrads and gradual students. John was also responsible for and taught some of his very popular classes on a Tuesday/Thursday cycle. These classes lasted an hour and a half per session and counted for three credit hours, those classes were so cutting edge  that they were some of the earliest classes tapped for inclusion in the continuing education program and were taught in studio-like lecture halls because they were being recorded.  The hour and a half class had a built-in break in the middle of the lectures so that people can regroup and refocus because they didn’t think the audience could sit for an hour and a half in front of a monitor. One problem for John was that he was a chain smoker, which meant that he was in complete misery while he lectured because they wouldn't allow anyone to smoke in the auditorium. He would lecture for 45 minutes, take advantage of the break to go outside the building to light up a cigarette. According to one of his gradual students, he would inhale half the cigarette in one breath.

Some of my friends were his gradual students, both masters and PhD level; they loved him because he was intense, very active as an advisor, diligent in  pushing his graduate students very hard while also maintaining a mentoring relationship with them.

I was leery of him after that initial meeting, and I made it a point to stay away from him. It wasn’t until after I became a PhD student that we became friends. John used to be one of the sponsors of EPAR, the Extended Period of Attitude Readjustment. It was a regular and famous gathering of professors and students, mostly gradual students with some brave undergraduate souls who crashed the party. It always took place at a local drinking establishment near the Georgia Tech campus at the end of each academic quarter, right before finals. A select group of professors would chip in on a pot and pay for free beers and pizzas until the money ran out. The time and location of the EPAR is usually passed by word of mouth. Most gradual students lived for EPAR: free beer and pizza, what’s not to love, and a chance to hobnob with professors was a great attraction. The scuttlebutt network amongst the gradual students came alive as the date approached. It was also a test of the undergraduate student’s courage and gumption because no official invitation was ever extended, so they had to be in the know to find out the particulars of the party. If I remember correctly, the key faculty members were Professors Gaylord, Uyemura, Sayle, Verriest, and a rotating cast of others. This was where John and I got to know each other better. We slowly became friendly.

I appreciated the fact that John was a bibliophile par excellence, while I was just on my initial forays into my tsundoku habit. He was of Japanese ancestry, and  I am Chinese, so we had a lot to talk about, comparing our experiences, and more importantly, sharing our list of favorite Asian restaurants in Atlanta. This was during the 1980s and 1990s when the Asian diaspora was settling into Atlanta. There were a lot of Asian restaurants opening so we would share notes on Japanese sushi places, Vietnamese pho places, Chinese dim sum places, and Korean noodle places. We  talked about music, we talked about politics, and we talked anything and everything under the sun. Sometimes we would talk in the hallways, sometimes in his book lined office.  

As I was getting ready to graduate after too many years as a gradual student, John would counsel me about the various job interviews that I would have. One day he grab me in the hallway and  I went into his office. He asked, in extreme seriousness:  What do you think you're doing? I asked:  What do you mean? He asked again:  What do you think you're doing running around the country?  I said that I was interviewing for jobs. What  kind of jobs? Academic jobs I said,  I want to be a professor. He looked me square in the eyes and said in as serious a tone as possible: do you know what a professor does in the United States? I said: I see what you guys do;  I'm surrounded by it. He replies: you don't know what I do. Do you know what tenure entails? I repeated the standard story told to young faculty members:  you are evaluated by three sets of activities: teaching, research, and service. He said: teaching doesn't count in the tenure process. He said: “ If you think that being a professor means you teach, and  if you want to be a teacher then being a professor is the wrong thing to do, especially in a Tier 1 research institution like Georgia Tech”. He continues: “ I do all the crap work of writing proposals, where a 10% hit rate is considered great; I get none of the fun or satisfaction of doing the research. He said, “I spend all of my time writing proposals trying to get funding for my graduate students to have all the fun and satisfaction of doing the research”. “I spend the rest of my time serving on interminable committees for the university or the department. I raely teach, I use my research grants to buy my way out of teaching because I just don't have time to teach like I want to teach. When I do teach, I put my all into the class, but those days are rare now.”

His plain talk sobered me up and opened my eyes to what was happening around me. Confirmation bias had blinded me to the kind of ethos that surrounded me.  I understood  that research was important but did not understand how skewed the process was towards bringing in funding. This conversation took place after I had interviewed for a faculty job in the Naval Postgraduate School, whose department head was one of John’s grad school friends at Cal Berkeley. The interview did not go well, partially because I was very naïve in my conversation with the faculty there. While teaching was more important at the NPS than at a research university, my myopia about the reality of being a faculty member was passed on to John and  that was the impetus for the plain talk.

My plans changed after talking to John,  I had a really hard think over a period of weeks, and I started to apply for industry jobs. I figured that if I was going to do anything,  I didn't want to be working on writing proposals for others to do research in my stead.

After I did my defense, I went to John's office, and I thanked him. I was scheduled to report to an  industry job the following month. I shook his hand and I thanked him for being my friend, for all of his wise counsel, for all the conversations that made me appreciate my time in gradual school, but I didn't tell him what I really wanted to tell him, which was that he changed my life because he cared enough to open up my eyes. I wanted to thank him for being friend enough to let me have it, for caring enough to give me that tough talk, for pointing out to me that I was headed in the wrong direction, that I was probably going to be miserable in the fantasy situation that I was convinced was perfect for me at that time.

Unfortunately, I won’t have the chance to truly thank him, for John suddenly passed away after I had graduated. The news of his passing struck me as a lightning bolt to the heart. I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing that I had never thanked him properly for doing me the greatest favor that a friend can do for a friend. I lament that I would never get to talk and laugh with my friend, and most importantly, the world and I lost a truly great human being.

One last anecdote about John. I had mentioned that he was a chain smoker of long standing. One day, he just quit cold turkey. He never gave any signs that he was considering that choice for his health. We all found out why he quit in the manner that he quit, when he excitedly told us that he was going to be a father for the first time, and he did it all for the baby and for his wife. That is the kind of guy he was.

I still miss not talking to him, all these many years later.