# 24 By [Ram](https://paragraph.com/@ram008) · 2023-07-16 --- Not the Surya Sivakumar movie, but it has been 24 years since I landed in the US for the first time at Chicago O’Hare international airport. Not my first time traveling out of India by any means, but my first time striking it out to make my own name and find a living. Too many stories glorify the coming to the US as an immigrant with 2 suitcases and some denomination of greenback currency obtained at a foreign exchange desk prior to boarding, whether a week or a month ago. No, my story isn’t about any of that, I arrived with a demand draft from my father, which was enough to keep me going for a few months if not a year. He estimated that I would need a refill and a couple of months prior to that, he asked me to just let me know and the next check would arrive. But this country rewards hustlers like none other. I came a couple of weeks early, determined to find a way to support myself. Inside my head, that initial check was going back within a couple of months, with a “thank you” gift. And that target was beaten quite handily. That has to do with really three things - a university that was kind to newcomers, friends that showed the way, and god’s grace or sheer luck, whichever way you look at it. This cannot be a long-winded story about what happened since I would be robbing future posts and my brain of the opportunity to reflect on this story each July 16th. But perhaps this is the day I will focus on one slice of the story, let us call this “reTyner” I began working within days of my arrival at the Agricultural Economics Department of my school, Purdue University. For someone that came from an engineering background, this was an interesting department and one that the school was really good at. I got in as an hourly employee working 1/4 time building personal webpages for one of the professors. The web was still new and tools for building webpages were nonexistent. These were the days of writing HTML and hosting on a local Apache server that would be connected via hard-coded ports to a DNS server of the university. Savvy professors wanted to show up early and claim a /~professor address and showcase their research or the work of their labs. One such savvy professor was a senior professor at the department. He shared a small corner of his office with a Sun Microsystems machine. Within a couple of hours, I had his webpage ready. He was genuinely impressed as he expected this would take a couple of weeks. He in fact told me that I could just have been pretending to work for a couple of weeks and he would have paid me for it. I told him that I was not trying to rob him. I asked him if he wanted me to continue working on enhancing it and adding more stuff to it. Like someone who has just had an appetizer that he liked at a restaurant, he said, “Impress me”. I went crazy in the next couple of days when he was traveling to a conference, embellishing the webpage with frames, reference links, pictures, etc. I then sent him a link via email to ask him what he felt. He saw this when he was at the conference and I did not get any replies, so I kept chugging along. When he returned, he told me that he had looked at this webpage and got a little kick out of seeing everything in one place. He also showed this and shared the link with his peers whom he met at the conference. I kind of detected this as I had put in a widget at the bottom of the page counting unique views and the number began racking up over the past couple of days. It could not be the professor just refreshing pages in keen excitement of what was coming next, it had to be other professors from their Netscape browsers. I found out later, that this professor, Dr. Steve Lovejoy, had referred me to the Department head, Dr. Wallace E Tyner, who was one of the legends at this university and in the department. He had represented us at the UN in sustainability forums and crop economics. I found that this department at the time had Nobel laureates, UN representatives and legends in the staff. Dr. Tyner gave me a full-time job as a Department Research Assistant. I would work directly under his supervision developing the web presence for his department at large. He was a Professor of highest integrity and he genuinely loved coaching young students. He was someone with compassion, empathy and humility. He did not care at all that I was from a different country, was of a different color, did not have anywhere close to his level or type of experience and yet he gave me a shot. A shot that would go to teach me everything I know about entrepreneurship or about funding. The first few people you meet in any new community, be it an apartment complex, a school, or a country, have a lasting impression in your head. This relationship with the United States began with people such as Dr. Tyner and that is how it has been so fortuitous. Dr. Tyner, Dr. Lovejoy, Dr. Hertel and every professor I worked with in this department left a lasting impression on me. They have rubbed a part of their personalities with me that I continue to embody and in turn, give back. So, no, I will not gloat in self-glory that I came with 2 suitcases and turned it around magically or found my mojo somehow. It took a lot of hustle, hard work, making do with what was there, and of course, learning on my feet. And, it took the kindness, trust, and guidance of people like Dr. Tyner, Dr. Lovejoy to be able to return that check back to my father with a token of gratitude. And…. it was God or what we call destiny that lead me to people like Dr. Tyner. I recently found that god gave Dr. Tyner a new assignment and a new birth to take his kindness to another world, perhaps another country that was needing his love and compassion. Live on, Dr. Tyner and thank you for everything. --- *Originally published on [Ram](https://paragraph.com/@ram008/24)*