My first job in the United States

I came to Texas A&M in August 1993. I was looking for a job or an assistantship. A&M at that time was using Oracle for Research Accounting. I heard of a job opening for an Oracle Developer/Business Analyst and I was the only person on campus who knew Oracle and SQL. I interviewed for the job with two managers. One interview with the hiring manager was very interesting. She was looking for a Graduate Assistant Non-Teaching data analyst really and she gave me a piece of paper with a bunch of names and numbers and asked me to type it. After I did in excel, she had me print it out and she checked it and there were zero errors and she hired me. She was kind enough to make the start day Monday instead of Wednesday the day I was interviewing so I could get qualify for in-state tuition. The difference was $1200. This was a YUGE deal. I got my Master’s in Electrical Engineering in 1995.  During that time, my interest was in sparse matrices and did some coding in Oracle and SQL for sparse matrices and published it in the local Oracle User group magazine.