I was supposed to be a rocket scientist. Let me explain.
When Sputnik first orbited the earth in 1956 I was in the fifth grade. Our rockets kept exploding on the launch pad. Eventually the Navy launched Vanguard and the Air Force launched Explorer, but it was too late. America had lost the race to space. They even sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit before our first suborbital manned flight. The American people demanded that something be done about it. So Congress did what Congress does and threw money at the problem.
The first thing that happened to me as a result was in seventh grade, a year and a half after Sputnik. MIT had taken some of that federal money and developed a new math curriculum for grade schools. An outfit known as the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) sent its curriculum, as set forth in some cheap papercover books, to any elementary school that asked for it. Mine did, so in the Fall of 1958 I started studying algebra and geometry, subjects usually taught in high school. I loved it, and did very well.
Then the summer after seventh grade I was invited to participate in a special science class for able and ambitious students. There were a few seventh graders and a bunch of eighth graders, and we studied the scientific method and how to report our findings. I remember that I was part of a project with two eighth grade girls, and that we conducted a study entitled "Growing Arizona Plants in a Martian Atmosphere". It was fun; my main job was to generate the several different gases (Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen, etc.) that made up the Martian atmosphere. We pumped them into a bell jar previously loaded with cacti, and stored it in a cooler with dry ice to approximate the temperatures on Mars. We presented our paper to some guest judges and came in second. It seems our method of getting the gases into the bell jar didn't approximate the proportions actually in the Martian atmosphere.
During eighth grade we continued our math studies with the SMSG texts, so that by the time I got to high school algebra was mostly a review. That year I placed fourth in the first year advanced section of the state math contest and received a nice book as a prize. My algebra teacher took me aside and explained that I could have done better if I had gone beyond the classwork; that was what the students did who placed higher. So the next year I not only took Geometry I and II, I also took Algebra III and IV. Sure enough, I won the state math contest, level two advanced; the first time anyone from my high school had done so well. This time I won a slide rule, a pretty good prize at the time. After I placed in the top three in level three advanced in my junior year, I started taking math classes at the local community college during my senior year and placed second in level four advanced. As a result the Arizona Association of Teachers of Mathematics awarded me a $500 college scholarship. Needless to say, that came in handy.
The summer after my sophomore year I was selected to participate in the Junior Engineers and Scientists Summer Institute (JESSI) at New Mexico State University. NMSU had taken its share of the federal funding and established a scholarship fund, so all my expenses were paid. That was where I met Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. He had retired from New Mexico State, but volunteered to mentor high school students in this special program. JESSI featured guest lectures from scientists from around the country, and exposed us to chemistry and physics for the first time.
Meanwhile, Arizona State University took some of that federal money and started a computer programming class for high school students on Saturdays during the school year. So during my junior year I took the bus to and from Tempe every Saturday and got to play with an IBM 1620 computer. This was in 1963 so we learned FORTRAN II, and the computer was the size of a small lecture hall and used punch cards. My phone has more computing power than this thing did, but it was state-of-the-art at the time.
Following my junior year in high school I participated in a National Science Foundation summer math seminar at Texas A&M University, once again on a scholarship. We studied calculus, group theory, and computer programming (once again FORTRAN II). Enough of this was review for me that I was able to go far beyond the classwork, as my algebra teacher had advised me to do two years earlier. There were thirty-two of us in the seminar, from five states. and we stayed in one of the dorms on campus (except for the one female student, who lived in town). I made good friends in the group, one of whom remains one of my best friends today.
During my senior year I continued my math studies with the first calculus course and a computer programming course at Phoenix College. I earned 12 credits which I transferred to Michigan State when I went there on a full scholarship the next year. Needless to say, this scholarship was also government-funded, and I started just as they wanted me to as a math major. But along the way something changed, and although I eventually earned a PhD it was not in STEM as it was supposed to be. Enough of my colleagues, though, went that route, and the USA took the lead in space with the moon landing and have never relinquished it.
