David St. John-Larkin '02

What is your fondest memory of your time in the CS department?

There are many memories from this time. Some of those that stick out include:

• My two most difficult classes were compilers and algorithms/data structures (second semester). I remember walking into one of the labs on the day that all of the Sun Microsystems UNIX clients were removed (to make room for more Linux machines).  I couldn’t believe that the Sun machines were really that old (!).
• Programming the Game of Life seemed to take a lifetime (as I recall our programming group sort of disintegrated, and a few of us pulled all-nighters to finish the project on time).
• Purchasing my first Linux distribution (Red Hat) from the student bookstore, where the software came in a box (!) (most commercial software was distributed on CD-ROM, at the time).
• On a sad note, I also remember being on campus on the morning of 9/11.  My first encounter with what was happening was super weird—walking into the MUB I had noticed several people standing around watching what I thought on first glance was Die Hard. The events surrounding 9/11 were so unimaginable that it was hard to comprehend the magnitude of what was unfolding around us, even when presented with live coverage of what was happening. I also remember how still and tranquil it was on campus (all air traffic had been grounded, many commercial flights were forced to land in airports across the UP, and the world literally seemed to come to a stop).

How has your education impacted your career?

My degree and CS-education positively impacted my career, almost immediately. Beyond equipping me with the technical credentials to practice in my area of law, Michigan Tech provided me with what I later discovered to be extremely rigorous and valuable training. I’ve worked alongside lots of CS-degreed professionals throughout my career, and I’ve always felt my education at Tech was among some of the best training I could have received anywhere. My basic skills were at par with others, and I was not afraid to tackle difficult problems, and in fact, I even enjoyed doing that! It’s hard to comparatively assess what you get in one place versus another, but I’ve never felt that I was behind, and, if anything, I felt empowered to tackle new problems, learn new languages, and wrestle with topics/subject matter outside of my comfort zone.

David works at Perkins Coie LLP, an international, general practice law firm headquartered out of Seattle, Washington. He is a partner within the firm, and he manages the firm’s Denver office.  His area of practice is patents, where he's worked primarily on software patent matters for more than 20 years. Most of his work is representing large, multi-national companies with their patent transactional legal matters.

He participates in the CS1000 Alumni Assignment project where alumni correspond with first-year computer science students and answer questions they have about the school, the program, the industry, or just life in general at Michigan Tech.