My name's Cyrus Durgin; I started at Evergreen in 1994. I ended up signing up for the Data to Information program which is one of Evergreen's introductory computer science programs, more or less on a whim. I had been doing computer stuff of various sorts, off and on for about ten years and decided that some sort of formal training in computer science related things might be fun or interesting.
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			So I signed up for D to I, had a really great year, had a great time in the class with all of the rest of the students, and also had a really great time just at Evergreen in general. The professors that I had in that class were terrific; they made a really good balance of sort of traditional computer science course work and also more general technology and information science related subjects.

	The next year I enrolled in the Student Originated Software program. I worked on a video game project. We managed to pull off almost all of the goals that we had set for ourselves in terms of actually making our video game work. I've got a lot of friends who went to more well known computer science schools, a lot of the ones on the East Coast with the big names, and I don't know any of them that got to do the sorts of things that I got to do my second year studying computer science at Evergreen, which was basically just define a software project and work on it pretty much full-time until it's done. We had a blast; it was great. By the end of the year all of us were pretty well prepared to move on to bigger and better projects. A couple of of folks I worked with graduated that year and went on to become software developers at pretty well known, well-respected companies.

			The year after that was sort of the really exciting year for me at Evergreen. I ended up doing a year long independent contract that was almost entirely self-guided. My faculty was great. Judy Cushing helped me out immensely during that year. Basically I knew what I wanted to do for my project and I had a pretty good sense of how I needed to go about doing it and working with Judy and the person who was my internship supervisor, Terry Thorsen. We managed to have just a really terrific year.

			I got to apply for and received a $12,500 grant from a sort of entrepreneurship and technology foundation on the East Coast. The Lemelson foundation is pretty new. They've started giving out grants to people in computer science or or other technology related fields who are doing independent projects. They tend to focus a little bit on projects that will eventually lead to some sort of business, or entrepreneurial effort. Judy was invaluable in dealing with those folks and just as a general resource person. I don't know any other undergraduate students that were able to able to apply for and receive a non-institutional grant for networking equipment so that I could set up a test network and have a pretty realistic development environment to do my work in.

			It was almost all self-directed. I had a lot of meetings with various people, did a lot of reading and a lot of just writing code - until my eyeballs fell out. It was great. I managed to produce a pretty solid piece of networking software. I built my own firewall, based on the Linux operating system, and had a terrific time.

	Evergreen is definitely one of the best-kept computer science secrets in the country. When you talk about college level computer science studies people think of places like UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon or MIT, or places like that, these big, work horse computer science farms basically. You show up and they sort of shuffle you around and pound as much knowledge into you as they can and at the end of four years you're pretty well ready to go work for NASA or Microsoft or some large corporation that is basically going to treat you the same way that the college treated you. They're going to stick you in a six by eight cubicle and give you a terminal and a couple times a week your manager will come over and give you more tasks to do.

	Evergreen doesn't do that. The opportunity at Evergreen to do independent contract work is one of the most valuable things about the school. It was definitely a great opportunity to say, "I've figured out that this is what I want to do so what do I need to do in order to be able to focus on these things." There was no extraneous stuff that I didn't care about. There were a lot of other things that people would point out to me and say, "Hey, if you're working on that sort of a project you might be interested in reading these other books that aren't necessarily computer science related but would give you a broader understanding of the field that you're working in, and that was terrific."

Cyrus is currently working at Amazon.com; he's one of the systems administrators in charge of their server and network security.

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