In the late 1980s, one young man’s life would go down a completely different path. A stranger series of events was about to alter his trajectory for his life. It was this Iraqi engineering student, then at Columbia University, who arranged for the narrator to meet. They consulted with the director of the only campus-based electron microscope facility at this Ivy League institution. At first, the narrator dismissed the planned sit-down. He figured that would be a mere formality as he prepared for his big backpacking adventure across Europe.
The narrator and his friend had a thrumming, danger-tinged two-week visit to New York all laid out in his head. Afterward, they planned to travel to London to investigate graduate school possibilities. The narrator faced a significant hurdle: he did not possess a US visa. What happened next—almost entirely by chance—in that short conversation, in New York City, was everything when someone said, “We’ll make that happen.” This apparently innocuous plea of guilty spelled the beginning of a new and beneficial chapter in his life.
After landing in New York, the narrator moved into the International House. This ten-storey residence on the Upper West Side was endowed by Rockefeller and built by architect James Gamble Rogers to house postgraduate students from every corner of the earth. He still meant to go on to London on his journey. Fate had other ideas, though, and he never got on that plane.
Instead, to his surprise, he was thrown into a dynamic intellectual setting. The next day he went out for a little sight-seeing, quickly realizing he was in a vibrant city filled with creative possibilities. When night fell, he headed back to the canteen at International House. There too, he began to develop relationships among adult community members and students.
The scheduled meeting with the new head of the university’s electron microscope facility weighed on his mind. As the days passed, he found himself truly wanting to go. Then the possibility of finally getting ahead and earning a graduate degree in America sounded better and better. His initial reluctance started to wash away as he started to realize the impact that this opportunity could have on his future.