United Way

Couple of years ago, September 2011, i planned to attend lunch where Jim Haslam was promoting United Way - non-for-profit organization to support communities with main focus on education, income and health. I missed it, but did sign pledge for year 2012. It was my first charitable contribution that was substantial and re-occuring deduction from each paycheck.

Interestingly enough reason to sign up the pledge has its trace to back in USSR, year 1989...

At last year in high school I planned to study at Moscow together with 2 friends from Uzhgorod school #15 - Dmitro Popovich (Дмитро Попович) and Yaroslav Gricko (Ярослав Грицько). But "B" grade in Ukrainian literature led to only silver medal, and unfortunately, there was nothing to do in Moscow at one of  "Ivy League" University - "Moscow Finance Institute" - without school gold medal (full name, Gold Medal for Remarkable Success in Study and Work and for Exemplary Behavior).

So as plan B i applied to local community college - Uzhgorod National University. My freshman years were very boring, until Dr. József Holovács (Головач Йосип Гнатович), back then Dean of faculty of Mathematics, approached me and Alexandr Smirnoff with offer to spend summer as interns at joint Soviet-American venture "United Way".

In 1987 Soviet Union legalized founding and operations of joint ventures between USSR and foreign countries. One of first joint venture between USA and USSR was named "United Way" and later had branch opened in Uzhgorod, Transcarpathia- gateway between USSR and 4 countries: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland.

Offer was accepted on the spot and in couple of weeks we met our mentor from United Way - Jacob Timoshenko (Яша Тимошенко). It was very interesting assignment to write on Turbo Pascal piano simulator. My first software project had almost 1000 lines of code and ...

Usually back then student were required to write code on paper and then signup for computer hour to type, compile, and test. Personal computers were managed in same way as mainframes. If error happened then there rarely enough time to fix it right there in front of PC; so person would leave home, re-read his code, find and fix mistake and then come back only next day. Cost of mistake was whole day of lost productivity.

So having dedicated PC for whole work day and ability to write directly to Borland IDE was biggest value from United Way interhsip.

So when Jim Haslam 2 years ago gave speech for pledges i was thinking that United Way of America was parent company of same venture i had internship with more than 20 years ago back in USSR. Turns out that it most probably just coincidence ... but if you happened to know more about joint venture please do share with me!

best regards,
Roman Havrylyak