Bill Sayle, 1942-2008

Bill Sayle was a professor at Georgia Tech.  He passed away earlier this year; I found out via a mention in the national IEEE newsletter (page 17 of this PDF), and then earlier this summer the GT ECE newsletter featured an article about him (page 3 of this PDF).

I have to admit that I did not know him that well, but 15 years ago he had an impact on the direction of my career.

From 1985 to 1990 I attended Georgia Tech in pursuit of a degree in Aerospace Engineering (AE).  I exhibited rather lackluster performance in acquiring my degree, basically slouching my way through 5.5 years of studies.  The truth is, I found many other things much more interesting, and just didn't really care that much about AE.  It didn't help that the aerospace industry had tanked in the late 80's as the end of Cold War paid a peace dividend and the defense industry shriveled.  But I can't just blame the industry for my inability to find AE work; my GPA was definitely crap, mostly weighed down by 3 or so years of serious slacking off.  It was only in the last 2 years or so of getting the AE degree that I really started trying, but at that point I had so much weight on my transcript that I could only pull my GPA up to a 2.4 .  Georgia Tech is a hard place, and AE one of the hardest degrees, but that's still rotten.

So I graduated (in Dec 1990) and started working full time.  As a temp slave.  Seriously, I had an AE degree from Georgia Tech -- one of the most difficult degrees from one of the most difficult schools in the country -- and I was working as a filing clerk at a government office downtown via a temp agency.  I discovered that year how little I needed to survive, because I made $11,000 that year, and that paid for everything, including rent and car insurance.  I made the best of the job (eventually developing some procedures and computer tools for them) but kept on looking for "real" work.  This went on for a whole year.

Finally in early 1992 I got a job as a field engineer with a company in the Atlanta suburbs that did contract work in the nuclear power industry.  They simply accepted anyone with a GT degree and then trained them to do the field work.  And off I went to nuclear plants around the country.  Some other time I'll write about my experience working in nuclear power.

In 1994, I had been out of college and in the workforce for 4 years.  Knowing that Georgia allowed you to claim in-state status (and the ridiculously cheap tuition rate) after 3 years of non-student residency, I had my eye on returning to Georgia Tech to get another degree.  At one point in my life I had fantasized about doing this endlessly, working and going to college and just accumulating degrees, but these days I've happily put my academic life behind me.  So anyway, at the time I was thinking about going back to Tech.  I quit the nuclear job in Dec 1993 and took a month or so off to relax, do all those things I would do "if I just had the time" and think about what I would do next.  ( I learned something about myself in those 1-2 months:  left without constraints or demands, I don't get much done.)

I decided to indeed go back to Tech fulltime and get an Electrical Engineering degree, but a Bachelor EE degree, not a Masters EE.  I had become interested in EE as a utilitarian degree, one that I could apply at home and in the community, certainly moreso than one can apply an AE degree.  So I really wanted to learn the basics of EE, not study some EE niche as a master's student.

Getting a second bachelor's degree brings up a bit of institutional bureacracy.  Georgia Tech allows you to apply credits earned at any time over the past 10 years to any degree, so I could use all those basic course credits (Calc, Physics, English, etc.) accrued during my AE studies in the 80's and apply them to an EE degree.  I just had to take all the EE courses, about 80 credit hours worth, which it turned out would take about 18 months of fulltime study.  I had started at Georgia Tech (and received my first course credit) in 1985.  If I was starting this work on the second degree in 1994, and it was going to take me 18 months, and I needed to take a quarter off in the middle somewhere to make some money, I was going to be in a bind.  By 1996, the 10-year sliding window was going to start killing my first credits from 1985 and 1986 -- basic courses that I certainly did not want to have to take again.  I needed an 11-year window.

And so that's where I was in February 1994.  I wanted to A) get accepted back into Georgia Tech to get a second degree, and B) I needed a waiver from them for the 10-year window, just a slight extension.  And remember that my first tenure with Georgia Tech was rather unimpressive -- I barely got out of there with my AE degree, with a truly awful GPA.

So with all that in mind, I wrote a letter to Bill Sayle, laying out this situation and requesting admission and the waiver.  To my delight, I guess he saw my potential and said that A) they'd admit me and B) he'd endorse my waiver request.  To be fair, I realize now that older students are safe bets, because they've crossed that maturation threshold that is hit-or-miss with regular college-aged students.

I made some contacts in the nuke industry and started coordinating some nuclear contract work (1-2 months at a time) to fit into the school schedule.  Over the next two years just two of these contract jobs paid for the study months (rent, food, tuition, etc.)  They were very hard work, with 72-hours weeks (the regulated maximum allowed) but with very good pay, enough to pay for my expenses for the rest of the year.

Exactly 2 years later, in March 1996, I finished my EE degree and started working at Scientific Atlanta as an electrical engineer.  Unlike my first time through Tech, this time I'd done fantastically well, landing on the Dean's List every quarter.  Considering my poor performance the first time, I'm pretty proud of that.  So I like to say that I've been on both sides of the academic fence -- the smartass slacker in the back of the room who barely survives to get the degree, and the smartass brown-noser in the front of the room who takes furious notes, engages the professor a lot, ruins the curve and gets the honors.

Bill Sayle was a small but critical part of that transformation, and I thank him for it.  RIP.

Comments

[Victor]

Dr. Sayle also played an important role in my rather circuitous GT trajectory and I will always think of him highly. Nice piece Chris.

[Rob]

Correction to our conversation today. "Got out" December, 1991.

[Chris C.]

Oh man, it took you a whole extra year :)

[Dan Schwartz]

I'm saddened to learn from your blog this evening that Bill Sayle has passed away. He taught me in his Power Electronics class in the early 80's when I too was the slacker in the back of the room. Taking a circuitous route to a B.E.E. like you, I dropped out at the end of 1983, completely burned out, in no small part to me being deafened at 19 back in early 1980... Which kind of sucks when your goal is to be an audio engineer. However, from what I learned first in Eugene Patronis' Physics 3265 class in Acoustics, and then in Dr W Marshall Leachs' EE4026 class in Audio Engineering, I was able to quickly train for a career as a hearing aid dispensing engineer.

I returned in January 1988 for the 24 hours in two quick quarters (bumping up against that pesky 10 year expiration since I started in Fall 1978); but this time armed to the teeth with top-notch hearing aids and an FM assistive listening system… And like you, I was the smart-ass blowing the curve; but with the FM as described here I was sitting in the back:
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=2&nav=display&webtag=ab-deafness&tid=4918

And YES, the story about kicking back with a beer in the huge Physics lecture hall is TRUE! …And in fact, I could get up & go to the can or stroll outside and not miss a word.

Anyway, back to Bill Sayle: Although my excellent Junior project under Dr Leach of a active filter crossover scored an A (in my first go-round), I still had to do a senior project. Being a bit careless, someone suggested I contact a PhD student -- Two years younger than I! -- as he wanted a driver for an ultrasound with impossible rise time for 300 volts swing in the 10's of nanosecond range in the hundreds of mA output. So, Danny looks at it, breadboards out a nice amplifier with a MOSFET driving a 6146B horizontal sweep tube, and called the twerp into the lab to verify it, get my grade, and go take a vacation.

"Twerp" is a good adjective for this guy, as he said "I can't take that to my scientific conference!" Serious FML.

So, I go talk to Bill Sayle, now in the main office having replaced old man White; and told him my dilemma. Bill took a look at my schematic & said Yeah, it worked; but go over to "Ack The Ripper" and get this power MOSFET and redesign your circuit.

But, I still had trouble with the rise time, as stray capacitance was killing me; so again it was Bill Sayle to the rescue, giving me a couple tips that saved my project… And I scored an A on it as well.

I'll definitely miss him almost as much as Marshall Leach.

Dan Schwartz,
Editor, The Hearing Blog http://www.TheHearingBlog.com
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[Chris C.]

Great stories, thanks Dan!