Maris Corzine

Greg – My Father

When did you decide to become a nuclear engineer and why?

I decided when I was in grade school because my father, who was a doctor, had a lot of patients whose husbands worked in engineering.  He talked about it some, and I remember we went down to look at the farm (nuclear plant). I thought it looked like a neat place to work, and wanted to learn more about nuclear engineering, what nuclear power was, and decided that that was what I wanted to do for my career. That was the stuff that happened that helped me make that decision.

Were there times in college when you doubted yourself?

Absolutely. My grades weren’t that great. My father died when I was 21, and so I wound up dropping out of school that quarter, and it got me behind a year just in one quarter. It was hard. It was hard to keep up with everybody so I looked at going into actuarial sciences about my third year or fourth year.

How did the death of your father affect your education?

It was all I could think about. My father was not there to talk to me anymore. I didn’t talk to him all the time but someone that was very much a given in my life, was suddenly gone. It was just difficult to deal with because it’s all you’re thinking about. You don’t have someone in your life anymore. You can’t touch them or talk to them anymore. I know that would upset him that I reacted that way, because those (bad) things that happen you should be able to get around them but it was very hard to concentrate on doing school work because the subject matter at the time was hard. It was easy to give up on school just to dwell on losing my father. Another thing I will say to that is my mother was not very forceful with me. She let things happen in time. She was very patient. I think if there was someone who was more demanding of me doing well, I might have tried harder then. But she was not willing to do that. In the end, it was up to me to make that decision not have a parent do that for me.

What subject did you struggle with most?

The higher maths. You know we got into functional analysis, number theory, and after calculus it started getting pretty difficult. I remember taking a functional analysis class that were mostly math majors in it and by the time it was done, about 3 quarters of the class had dropped it (chuckles). It was me, one other engineer, and about four math majors that were still in it. I stuck with it and got a D (laughs).

Is there anything you wish you could change looking back?

Yes. I wish I would’ve tried harder at the beginning and had been more willing to work with other people, to ask for help more readily. I think that would have made a difference and I would have done better academically. Some stuff I can’t change like when I was very upset my father died. It was hard to get around that. It was just a hard thing to do. And I can’t change that. You never know when stuff like that is going to happen.

What do you plan to do after you retire?

Actually, I don’t plan on retiring. That’s my retirement plan. I have to work until I am 80. I figure I’ll drop dead before then (laughs). But if I get to retire, I would like to travel. I’d like to go places and volunteer doing things physically to help people. I wish I could have done that when I was younger when I had the physical stamina to do that. If I try to do that at age 70 or so, it’s going to be difficult but I think I can still do stuff. There’s a lot of things that I haven’t gotten to see that I would really like to. So probably the biggest think I would like to do when I retire is travel.

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