Summa Cum Something

In honor of today's revelations about the grades of George W. Bush and John Kerry from their Yale days I thought I would tell a little story about my GPA.

I wasn't a standout student in High School or College, by any means. The only "D" grade I got was in an Art class in High School. I came fairly close to getting a "D" in one of my Political Science classes at BYU. I got by all right and didn't strain any intellectual muscles in the process.

A couple of months after beginning work at NSA, my roommate, Eric Rasmussen, came home from work and asked if I realized that NSA had a GPA minimum of 3.0 for hiring. Neither one of us knew that and neither one of us had paid much attention to our GPA. We figured the degree was the important thing and if we passed, we passed. So we both rummaged through our papers to find our transcripts and see how we had done. I found that my overall undergraduate GPA was 3.02 and Eric's was 3.01. Whew! We had a good laugh at our collective ability to squeak by when it counted.