Formal education

My formal education itinerary has had some episodes that, with hindsight, I consider noteworthy, perhaps because they are outlandish. In general, I think I was a reasonably good, responsible and conscientious student. Except for a couple of times when I was not very good, and I was more distracted than I should have been. But since that was temporary, and I was eventually able to get a degree of some substance, I think I enjoyed a balanced student life, at least in my own way. Could I have gotten better grades? Undoubtedly. Would I admit to changing my lifestyle to facilitate better academic performance? Well, in hindsight, no. I think it was fine the way it was, and my subsequent work life has always been very demanding, so the expansive moments in my youth provided me with a social and emotional balance that I value highly.

Preschool

I have memories of kindergarten and preschool. The daycare was right below my grandmother’s house. One day they took a picture of me in the kindergarten, and when they gave it to me, I started eating some macaroni and tomato -the ones my grandmother used to make, so good- looking at the picture. Narcissistic from an early age, I guess, lmao. Here is the picture, then. Yes, tomato sauce. Of course it is.

School

At school I did not do badly at all. I had good teachers (J.F.C.) of whom I still have fond memories, and my existence was as lively or anodyne as that of any other child of my age. In fifth grade of EGB we simulated an election for student representatives and I ran in coalition with a great friend of mine, M.D.A.Z., “Monstrous Coalition”. I don’t remember well what was the electoral program we proposed, who knows. The fact is that we won. Maybe I should have gone into politics, shouldn’t I? It seems that I had what it takes.

A little later, and with the old excuse that it would be useful for my studies in high school, I convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer. An Amstrad CPC 6128 with color monitor. It was amazing, because it read 3″ floppy diskettes instead of the cassettes that my friends’ computers had. The operating system was CP/M (a rival OS that lost to the more usable MS-DOS), and the programming language was BASIC. Unfortunately that computer was never productive for my education, and I devoted it to playing video games. In any case, the school marks were all good.

High school – vocational training

The first semi-conscious decision for my educational path came about by chance. My several years older brother had enrolled in an office program training course: Word Perfect, Lotus 123, and the like. Because of a job opportunity that arose in another province, he suddenly found himself unable to attend the course, and when the academy refused to give him a refund, he asked them for me to go in his place, so as not to lose the money altogether. I was 13 years old and I don’t even know how they admitted a child like me to attend the course. The fact is that I was very good at it. And as I liked to spend hours and hours in front of the computer (although in reality, what I was doing was playing video games), it seemed appropriate that, instead of continuing along the path of studying high school and preparing to go to university, I should shorten my time and go as quickly as possible to work with a computer in front of me. So I decided to study a second-degree Vocational Training module in Computer Science. But of course, to get to the second degree I had to study a first degree module first, and among the possibilities that were available, it seemed the most appropriate to study Administrative Assistant. Two years of Administrative Assistant studies, and then three years of Computer Science. That was the plan. So I enrolled in a new vocational training center called Ramón y Cajal, in what would be its first year in Córdoba. The center was so new, they had no student card template of their own, so they shamelessly reused the one from another vocational training center, La Fuensanta.

A lost year, as it were. I never found myself in an environment that I liked (there was a plethora of repeaters from other centers, who had exhausted the B.U.P. exams, and were redirected to this center). I was not interested in any subject at all. Nothing about Management, Accounting, nothing. The only really useful thing I took away from that year was typing, which in the exam I had to do 350 keystrokes per minute, and I scored over 400. That was a pyrrhic victory.

Redirected towards the BUP/COU/University itinerary, I enrolled in the I.E.S. López Neyra. The previous year, while I was taking Administrative Assistant courses, I had not taken any science or other core subjects, but I adapted without major problems -as far as I can remember now-. But the biggest change (gain, actually) was, as with all teenagers, on a social level. Those were kids my age, with similar interest. By the way, I was not hazed, although I do remember someone who was put in the water basin on the side, at some break between classes. Or the guy who got his face painted with kanfort. Nothing special either.

In the second year of high school something happened to me that left a mark for the rest of my life. Having got involved in a more dissolute life, I began to neglect my studies a bit. As the exams were not very challenging, I got used to memorize quickly whatever it was 15 minutes before and drop it like a parrot -the “books and notes out” of the teacher to distribute the exam and my immediate answer “one more second, one more second” has been since then a classic for me-. But of course, that wasn’t sustainable and I flunked a few times. So occasionally, I copied. I didn’t copy many times, because of course, I didn’t have much practice of it, and soon enough I was caught by a teacher. Out loud, in front of the rest of the class, he asked me why I was copying, that he found it disappointing, that he didn’t expect it from me.

I remember the heat rising in my face, of embarrassment, and it is certain that I blushed like a tomato. I don’t remember the punishment or anything else, just the feeling of shame. It was a very effective psychological trick. That was the last time in my life I cheated on any kind of academic test. (A different thing is that I went to take the practical driver’s license test driving myself from my neighborhood in my brother’s car, but you will agree with me that the practical driver’s license test does not count as a proper academic test).

Around the same time, the group of friends from the neighborhood where I lived began to manage the Youth Committee of the Neighborhood Association. Through the committee, we organized activities to make the neighborhood more dynamic (bike rides, rock concerts, sports tournaments, cultural exchanges with foreign countries, etc.) and also to make demands (demonstrations demanding improvements in the neighborhood’s facilities and things like that). Our parents were delighted to see us committed to the neighborhood movement and we had sort of a free hand to manage ourselves. And it was a lot of fun, at that age, to get involved in meetings, voting, taking minutes, and that sort of thing.

So, as it could not be otherwise, in C.O.U. I got involved in the Democratic Association of Students of Cordoba (A.D.E.C.) that had been created within the high school; it was a student organization of Secondary Education, close to the Student Union and part of FAEMA, and later we became a Federation (FADEC) and began to interact and coordinate with other high schools of the city. In addition to the usual recreational and sports activities, ADEC had a vindictive profile, politically very progressive, and soon we began to orbit around various youth sections of some political parties. We never integrated, nor formally hooked up with any of them. In ADEC there was room for all political sensitivities although most of us were, in those days, very progressive. Very. Very. What a time.

ADEC was assigned, as the headquarters of the association and the federation, a classroom on the top floor of the high school building, adjacent to the other classrooms and without much school furniture. There we kept the material for the activities (posters, etc.) and met to operate the association. The reality is that in the closets, under the posters, we had bottles of liquor, and we also smoked, although it was forbidden in the whole institute. We would be 15 or 20 young people, well acquainted, and we would meet at ADEC to do our things or even to study, if the room was reasonably empty and quiet. We were the only ones who had the keys and the teachers were not allowed to enter.

Due to a series of circumstances and/or events of which I do not remember well -and maybe that is the key- I did not pass the COU course. I failed only two subjects: Mathematics and Physics. In Mathematics, the fault was mine and mine alone, because I was not interested in it. In Physics, my teacher was a person with no teaching motivation, who gave us photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of handwritten notes of inclined planes, and she was chewing gum with her mouth open -all the time. M.A.M., I still remember you and your hair crochet that you wore at half-mast in your fringe. I do remember you.

My parents, with good judgment, immediately and radically cut me off from all financial support. I no longer had an allowance to go out, so I had to find a way to earn pocket money. I became a ping-pong instructor for the City Council at the Civic Center of the neighborhood, a little job that allowed me to earn a few pennies to go out with. And when I had no more savings left and I couldn’t make ends meet, I went to work in the afternoons in a pizza-bar. And in the summer, I worked some weekends as a waiter in a bar-restaurant. Unexpectedly, the punishment had an undesired effect: it made me financially independent, and I had no business at home. Following successive measures of pressure that my parents tried to exert on me, I learned to cook, clean, wash and iron. I lived as if in a boarding house. I became unmanageable. Now, with hindsight, I mourn for my parents, who watched my life prospects plummet down the gorge, unable to do anything effective about it.

Thus, I had to repeat C.O.U., but only with two subjects. For the rest of the classes, my attendance was optional, since I had already passed them the previous year. In this context, it is not difficult to imagine the path I chose. I didn’t set foot in any class during the whole year. I would go to the high school building, enter through one door and leave through the other, heading for the foosball tables or the billiards. Or I’d hang out in the ADEC room all day lounging around. Or I’d wander around for a walk. I was convinced that it was not worth studying at the University, so I was going to enjoy as much as I could my last months of freedom before I started looking for any job and close my student stage.

But lo and behold, a friend from the neighborhood invited me to go to his town, Villanueva del Duque, to pick olives. We got together a group of kids and we went to spend the weekend, to earn a few pennies, and to go out to check the night life in the village. Ah, and of course, to pick olives. Well, I don’t even want to remember when I had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, freezing cold, put on a tracksuit and drink a cup of coffee, take the car out to the countryside, and at around 6:00 in the morning, with a clear sky, we were already out there working. By the time the night came, no Disco-Clips or anything else. I was not there for anyone. I was exhausted. And there was still Sunday to work next day before returning. A revelation, a moment of clairvoyance, an intellectual enlightenment… call it what you will, I was not made for manual labor. Especially not in the cold. So I took what I could find of my class notes, took them to the pizzeria where I worked, and read them under the bar between serving and pouring. It wasn’t much, but doing nothing was even less. I started going to classes, and more or less catching things I remembered from the previous year. I photocopied class notes like a madman, and gave myself a chance. And I passed those two pending subjects in May.

There were barely three weeks between the final exams in high school and the Selectividad (SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test) exams, if I remember correctly. And I found myself without any basis in subjects like chemistry or biology, and I don’t even want to tell you about the humanities subjects, I did not even know where to start. So I had an urgent problem to solve. Fortunately, I was not the only one in a similar situation. In my class and the other pure science C.O.U. there were other repeaters with two subjects, who also had to squeeze in those few days. So four of us (A.B.B., F.S.C., F.J.G.L. and I) put up a united front and came up with a crazy plan, a majestic synthesis of all the bad habits the four of us had accumulated during those perfidious years of being bad students. One of them had an empty apartment, where we would go to study every night, starting at 10 or 11 o’clock PM, to get the body used to it. We would be studying all night, exchanging notes, solving problems, clearing up doubts, etc. And in the morning we would go home, to continue studying individually, until it was after-lunch time (the siesta), when we would go to sleep. Basically we switched our body schedule because the Selectividad tests were to happen in the morning, and we needed the night to “refresh” our memory (does it sound familiar?). So we got down to work, and surprisingly we were very strict and productive with our work methodology. We had no alcohol, we had a coffee before we started, and we spent the whole night studying in a room with some chips and snacks. That way, hour after hour, in the silence of the night. At the beginning it was a bit more difficult to change the time, so we used – well, at least me, I do not remember the others – a pharmaceutical stimulant that was very popular among students at the time, the Katovit. (I am cracking up, just now I read that the Katovit was a derivative of amphetamine hahahaha! so that was the cause we performed back in those days! but how? if you could get it at the pharmacy without prescription! lmao!).

So while good students were quietly going over their subjects during the day and enabling themselves to arrive relaxed and rested for the most important exams of the year, the four of us industrialized the study process to maximize our efficiency. At the beginning of each evening, we would divide the subject matter syllabus into four parts and each of us would be responsible for summarizing its contents on an A3-sized sheet of paper. Indexes, outlines, diagrams, whatever made sense. After an agreed time, we would pass our summary to a colleague, and receive another colleague’s summary. Now the goal was to summarize that just received A3-sized summary again to a A4-size summary, as we corrected and asked questions. After another time, we exchanged those A4s again, this time, to summarize again in a A5-sized sheet. In this process, we had covered three quarters of the syllabus and resolved in common every doubt that had arisen. We only had to take those A3s, A4s and A5s that had already been made of the fourth part of the syllabus that was missing, and solve the doubts. In the morning, once the stores opened, we photocopied the entire collection of sheets and went home to solve problems. And then to sleep at siesta time until the evening.

With hindsight, the four of us formed a group with high motivation and high mutual trust, as we all strived to do the best job of summarizing the syllabus we were assigned, so that we could share it with our colleagues and that it would be useful to everyone. The truth is that we improvised, during those crazy days, a high performance team. We, the hopeless repeaters, did not give up.

Of course, we have many anecdotes, in that cocktail of coffee, Katovit and diagrams in small letters – to fit everything that was strictly necessary – such as nervous fits of laughter or moments of despair. But we persevered and went on.

Although our plan was very good, it was not perfect. The SATs lasted 4 days, and the first day was the day of Language, Literature, Text Commentary and English. So it was the only day that was double session morning and afternoon. Which, for normal students, was not a big problem, but for the four of us, it was a real intellectual – and physical – challenge. Every exam day, first thing in the morning, we would walk directly from that empty apartment (in the Figueroa) to the School of Agronomists (where we had our exams) so as not to waste time, and also to relax a bit before the exam. So on the first day, we would overextend our usual time to go to sleep (siesta) for several hours while doing tests. Solution: black coffee after lunch and then, all or nothing.

Well, I almost got nothing. In the afternoon, during the English exam, something unheard of happened to me. I literally lost control of my hand. It was traveling alone, by itself, over the paper. And there is an explanation for that.

In order to preserve the anonymity of the examinee from the correcting teacher, the booklets of pages of the Selectividad exam were die-cut, leaving the upper part (about 15% of the total surface) reserved for the identification of the student, and the rest of the paper, free, for the answer to the exam. On both the upper and lower parts, the same unique code was printed, so that when the upper part was torn off, the correcting teacher could not see the identity of the person being corrected. Theoretically, this is a very appropriate idea. The execution of the idea, itself, definitely could have been done better. It turns out that only on the first sheet of the first page of the booklet were the identification fields that each student had to fill in with his or her name and ID. When you turned the first page over, to continue writing on the second sheet, that top part was not marked in any way that it was a reserved space and could not be written there. It was obvious that it was going to be torn off before the exam was corrected, so everything written in that part would be lost. And you just had to look at the die-cut line and continue writing underneath. But of course, that applies to normal people, not the headless ones who go flying high as a kite with a pen in their hand. So, in the afternoon, finishing the English test, which was coming out embroidered, I realized that I had used that “forbidden” part in each of the pages to write part of the answer. As if the die-cutting had never existed. I looked at the clock, there were still more than 20 minutes left, and I went relatively calmly to one of the teachers on duty in the room and explained what had happened to me. He kindly replied that my only option was to take a new answer booklet and pass everything cleanly avoiding the die-cut part. “Well, it is understood that there is no other solution, no problem, I will start immediately as I have time enough for sure”.

When I had spent 10 minutes cleaning up, and at a very good pace (although, I must admit, with worse handwriting), I realize that I have written again in one of the die-cut areas of an inner sheet. Not in the first, not in the second, but by the third (or fourth) page, as I no longer kept present that rule in my mind that I could write there. So, now way more nervous, and with only 10 minutes left before the end of the exam, I got up again and went to the same professor to explain what had happened to me again. Understandably, his answer was the same: the only thing I could do was to pass it again in another clean booklet. So, in a hurry, I grabbed a new booklet and started to clean up the contents of the first booklet again, now aware that I would not have time enough to finish. By that time, my area of the table was already a jumble of papers and crossings out. And the students who were already finishing the exam were getting up and leaving the room. I suppose they were observing the spectacle and flee in terror before the foreseeable final explosion.

And that’s when I got the spark: after the first paragraph, and while typing at full speed, my right hand started to control itself. I was trying to write a line while looking at the paper I was copying, and my hand, instead of moving from left to right, started to draw a continuous line -without taking the tip of the pen off the paper- from top to bottom. That is, I would write the first four or five words and, in the middle of the line and while my mind wanted to continue writing what I was reading, my hand would make a scratch going down the clean part of the paper. A panic attack, a mini stroke, what do I know. At that point I got up again and went to the professor to explain what was happening to me and that I obviously needed more time to complete the copy and a new booklet. He very reasonably indicated to me that this was not possible, that the rules were the same for everyone and there were no exceptions. And that, when it was time, he would leave the class. So, with three half-written booklets, and with valid parts written that were inexorably going to be eliminated from the answer, I had 3 minutes left to do something. To make matters worse, when copying from the first booklet to the second, and from the second to the third booklet, there was clearly no 1-to-1 correspondence in the spaces used; the paragraphs were not in the same place, so I could not simply cut and replace one sheet with another.

The solution: I asked the teacher for a stapler and a roll of adhesive tape, and I started to make a collage by stapling mixed pieces of each of the booklets, and I marked with thick arrows in pen the ITINERARY that the correcting teacher should follow to understand the tangle of arrows, blurs and numbers of correspondence between this mess of sheets stapled together with, literally, paragraphs glued on top of each other.

Quite an ode to chaos of which I feel deeply ashamed, and of which I am sure that, whoever had the misfortune of correcting that exam, still remembers. I suspect that, indirectly and anonymously, I have been an anonymous object of ridicule in his cañas and tardeo -for years.

So, once it is time to hand in the monstrosity -of course the last one still left in the class- and having in my hands that amphetamine origami, I wouldn’t think of anything else in that moment of hallucination than to bring out my misunderstood vindictive/student union vein and tell the professor that the duty of whoever corrects the exam is to evaluate my knowledge, not so much the presentation. That if he gives me the opportunity, I will gladly write down in 15 minutes in a new booklet everything I have written, word for word, and that he could verify that I was not cheating and adding new content. But if he refused, then whoever would correct my exam, follow the arrows and the indications. That I had done well on the test and so on. Shamelessly arrogant.

I don’t want to imagine what went through that man’s head when he had me in front of him with my eyes out of their sockets. I have such a clear memory that I, all cocky -back then I did not lift two feet off the ground, but I was sometimes dumbly cocky-, went to the meeting point with my classmates who, of course, were already commenting on my hallucinated performance. When I told them what I had said to the teacher on duty, they advised me to look for him and apologize. That he was not to blame for me being high as a kite, and that he was surely going to throw my exam in the trash directly. So, in another memorable moment, I went on a tour of the School of Agronomists until I found him on a side staircase and apologized to him for my behavior. I’m sure he reassured me that nothing was wrong, and that it was normal to be nervous in those days. That my exam was going to be corrected based on the content and not the presentation. I left ok, I had no other choice.

Dear all, I got a B in English in Selectividad; maybe if I would had manage to deliver it in just one booklet I might even get an A! xD . On the other hand, being in such a state of nervousness that you see your hand move without being able to control it was too shocking and traumatizing. I have never in my life gone back to taking artificial stimulants to study or work -beyond coffee or tea-. It’s not worth the gamble to get something serious. Never again.

The rest of the exams were more normal, we were able to sleep and we followed the last minute study method we had implemented in the following days. We did well, I think that the four horsemen of the apocalypse passed the Selectividad -I’m not 100% sure about that- and I, in particular, got a grade to be able to choose any of the careers that I would have an interest into. I even got an honors mark in Text Commentary, because of course, they requested an analysis describing the fall of the Romanian communist dictator Ceaucescu, and I do not remember what I put, but because of my political ideas at that time I probably made an ideologically biased analysis and, probably, I got Trostky reincarnated to correct my exam. Whatever you want, but that’s a honor mark in the bag.

Once I passed the Selectividad, and without clausus numbers limitation to choose a career, my first choice was, no one should be surprised, to study Political Science in Granada. Of course, having a High School itinerary of Pure Sciences, Selectividad of Pure Sciences, I had to switch to Granada to study and learn how to make strikes and demonstrate against the government better. Pure logic. My parents, clairvoyant as they were, told me that if I would go to Granada, I would spend the whole year partying, for later returning in June without having passed a single subject, and then I would have to look for a job in Cordoba -or wherever. Instead of that, I should save a year and start looking for a job. If I wanted to go to Granada I could go, but they were not going to financially support me for it. That I should find my own way. How wise, how great they were. Thank you!

So my options were reduced to those university careers that were offered in Cordoba. Of course, I still had the computer science bug, but in Cordoba at that time they only offered a 3-year Technical Engineering degree in Computer Management. The word “management” made me cringe because it brought back painful memories of that lost year in Administration Assistant studies. The other option was a career, which was newly introduced in the city, in which I would be part of the first promotion -if I finished it on time, of course-. The Bachelor’s Degree in Physics.

They were promoting it a lot because perhaps they were not very convinced of how it was going to be received. There was already Physics in Seville and Granada, and Córdoba did not have an industrial center or a potentially strong demand for Physicists -the nearest particle accelerator is a few thousand kilometers to the north-.

You can imagine what sense it would make for someone who had repeated the previous year the Curso de Orientación Universitaria (C.O.U.) (College Orientation Course) repeating with only Mathematics and Physics (Physics is 20-30% Mathematics). It makes no sense, does it? Who could come up with such a nonsense? Anyone who simply understood the meaning of the word Orientation would have discarded it ipso-facto, in view of the factual results.

But what would have happened to my life if I had remained in doubt? Was I incapable of understanding those equations, those problems, or had I just been a lazy-ass person at that specific moment in my life? Well, I had to find out. And to belong to the first promotion was also a very big incentive, to be honest. It sounded like a pioneer. And there wasn’t much work in Córdoba available at that time.

The Professor -and former Rector- who sponsored the course, an intellectually privileged S.E.Ñ.O.R., was a leading figure in the field of electromagnetism at European level. And his level of demand was so high that when he drew up the study plan, instead of defining it for four years -as was becoming the norm at that time- he lengthened it to five years, with 300 credits, an outrageous amount. What’s more, instead of designing it in two parts (intermediate and higher degree), the 5 years were all at once, with no intermediate degree. Once you started, it was all or nothing.

My parents got me a scholarship, which covered my tuition fees year by year, but would be automatically revoked if I failed 20% of the 60 credits I would take each year. Without a scholarship I would not be able to continue studying, so the calculation shows that I would only be able to fail a maximum of 12 credits each year. In the first year alone, there were two 12-credit subjects and one monstrous 15-credit subject taught by the Professor himself. So, when after the first two weeks I saw that I did not have the level of mathematics or physics of my classmates – but hey, what was I expecting? – I went back to drawing up a crazy plan of my own: since the scholarship is per year, and that includes the September trials, then the optimal way to face the course was to choose one or two subjects at the beginning of the year and leave them directly for September, and expand the time available for the rest, which I would have to pass directly in February/June, no matter what. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for him!. On the other hand, I found out that for each credit in which you get the grade of “Honor” eliminates the payment of one credit in the following year’s tuition. So, if I were to ask, it would be nice if I could optimize the efforts to make peaks in some subjects and make sure that, in case I lose the scholarship, I could afford the cost of the next year’s tuition by compensating some credits of Honors. Here it is, the one who came from repeating Math and Physics. Yes, that one. Aha.

At the beginning this exercise was mostly theoretical, since, after assigning one or two subjects to September, my effort was more or less homogeneous in all subjects, of course with my philias and my phobias. And I was simply better at some subjects and worse at others.

As it is easy to imagine, during the first year I also got involved in various aspects of the student dynamics at the university, co-founding the Physics Students Association “Cosmos” (which did not fly much beyond a couple of field trips), and participating in the freshmen revolution for the elections to the Board of Governors of the Faculty of Science, where we newly arrived students agreed to vote as a block and I was elected as the student representative.

The first year I passed it all, and somewhere in the middle of the second year, my former ADEC colleagues at the IES López Neyra asked us, some former members of the association who were in different colleges, to return one day to the institute to give a motivational talk to explain to the current students what the University was like and that it was really worthwhile to continue studying. Along with others, I agreed, and we spent a morning going from class to class giving a brief presentation and answering questions. We didn’t know which class we were going to go in, we just knocked on the door and the professors were already on notice that someone was coming to give a 10-minute talk. And, as luck would have it, chance led me to the physics class at C.O.U. where my former teacher, M.A.M., was teaching at the time. As I walked in she looked at me and asked me what I was doing there. When I explained that I was part of a group of university students who were coming to give a talk, she asked me with a half smile on her face what university degree I was studying. I answered that I was studying Physics, first promotion in Córdoba. Without believing it, she asked me how I was doing. And I answered that I had come out of the first year clean, and even with very good grades in some subjects. I don’t know if she believed it, but I’m sure she could see in my eyes the mixture of pride – and also, why not, resentment – as I answered her. She slipped out of the classroom to let me give the talk. Chau.

Throughout the following courses, a feeling of uneasiness invaded me. I had better expectations of what it would be like to study Physics, particularly subjects that, because of their name, theoretically attracted me a lot; but the reality is that I did not feel attached to what I was studying, it was definitely not vocational. I explored the possibility of dropping out and transferring my file to Computer Science, which I would finish sooner, and it was more in line with my real interests. But, because of the structure of the curriculum, there was no univocal equivalence between Physics and Engineering subjects. That meant starting over -again-. So, I decided to go ahead, to finish my degree, and then figure it out.

As it could not be otherwise, over time I became involved in other activities in parallel to my studies -or as a complement to them-. A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Student collaborator in the Physics Department
• Student collaborator in the Department of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis
• Student representative on the Physics Department Council
• Student representative on the Board of Governors of the Faculty of Science.
• Responsible for the Cinematography and Performing Arts Classroom of the University of Cordoba.

I also made the Conscientious Objection -Substitutionary Social Benefit- in the Department of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis. And, in addition to the occasional job of tutoring high school students, I also found a job as an editor/reporter for the Technology Section of the weekly newspaper La Calle de Córdoba. My schedule was pretty full, considering that, apart from all the things I was involved in, I still had to study -and pass, of course.

I must admit that I have never again been immersed in such a net concentration of elite-grade gray matter as I was during my university years. It is true that later I have had the fortune to work with professionally brilliant people, business supernovas, but seeing and participating in the evolution of the group of kids that we started in the first year and culminated together in the fifth year was an extraordinary experience. It is the golden standard for me. I feel very fortunate for the help and affection I received throughout my career, which helped me not to get demotivated and keep pushing when I did not understand a knob of the sheets and sheets full of equations and theorems that I had in front of me. I would never have been able to finish had it not been for that support. The impact on the rest of my life is transcendental and for that, my appreciation is e.t.e.r.n.a.l. <3

In the end, not without effort, I managed to finish the degree in the five years that corresponded to the first promotion. We started 78 students in the first year and finished 23. With this sui-generis methodology of mine, I kept my scholarship and, just in case, I got a total of 10 honors during those five years. There were also subjects that I failed and had to make up, it must be said.

Several colleagues are today in prominent positions in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, in the European Union, others are Professors and University Professors in Europe or are in Research Departments of companies, others are extraordinary executives and managers, and absolutely all of them are an intellectual reference for me. Here goes my recognition for all of them. I am a lucky guy for having been able to share class with them.

In the end, I was able to sing the Gaudeamus Igitur and to give for good that strange way of formation that I followed. And I also got rid of the doubt that I had before I enrolled in the career: yes, in that C.O.U. I was a lazy-ass and a fool.

The demands of the career were such that, years later, the government had to homologate that degree of Bachelor in Physics with the European Qualifications Framework and, in order to compare with the current level of studies, officially the BOE assigned a Level 3 in the Spanish Framework and a Level 7 in the European Framework, which corresponds to Master’s level. So my official qualification as of today is Master in Physics.

Not too bad for a failed Physics and Math student, don’t you think? 😉