There are certain summers that stick with you—not because everything went smoothly, but because life had a way of handing you exactly the lessons you needed. My internship in the state of Washington, the summer of 1980, was one of those. Back then, I was a junior at Iowa State, trying to line up all the things I thought would guarantee a good job after graduation: solid grades, some campus involvement, and most importantly, that golden ticket on any engineering résumé—an internship in your field. So I spent the spring sending out application after application, collecting a thick stack of rejection letters in return. It became routine enough that some days I’d find myself laughing at how efficiently companies could say “No thanks.” My dorm room wall was full of “flush letters” and I treated it like it was a badge of honor.

There are seasons in life you don’t see coming—chapters that don’t announce themselves with fanfare, yet settle so deeply into your memory that years later you can still smell the lake water, feel the pull of the tow rope, and hear the hum of a boat engine echoing across a still summer evening. For me, one of those chapters began the moment I graduated from Iowa State in May of 1981 and took my first real job at 3M. I was barely 22, carrying that mix of confidence and cluelessness that only a new graduate can pull off, and ready to step into the adult world.

When I think back to my childhood— maybe around nine years old—there’s a very specific smell, a very specific feeling, that comes rushing back: the scent of ink and old paper from a stack of Marvel comic books. It’s funny how memory works. I can’t remember what I ate last Tuesday, but I can still picture—clear as day—the cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #56 with the Daily Bugle headlines screaming "Spidey joins Doc Ock" sitting on the floor of my bedroom, or the way the corner store rack looked when I spun it, hoping for a new issue of anything with the red-and-blue web-slinger on the front.

When people talk about college, they usually focus on the same things: the late-night studying, the endless tests, the professors with impossible standards, and the scramble to register for the right classes before everything fills up. And all of that was certainly part of my four years at Iowa State University. In fact, those early years—the freshman and sophomore stretch—felt like a long hallway of syllabi, homework, and trying not to look completely overwhelmed by the intensity of it all. For a small-town kid from New Lisbon, stepping onto campus in Ames felt like entering another world entirely. I spent much of those first two years simply trying to keep up.