Jerry Floyd '64

I was born in 1942 in Long Beach, California, where I attended Woodrow Wilson High School, graduating in 1959. I attended first Long Beach City College and then Long Beach State College, where I graduated in 1964 with a BA in history. In the fall of 1964, with the Vietnam War in progress, I attended Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and then spent three years on active duty, attaining the rank of Lieutenant. In September 1968, I enrolled at Yale University as a graduate student in the History Department. After passing oral qualification exams for PhD candidacy in March 1972, I was accepted as a participant in the graduate student and young faculty exchange with the USSR for the 1972 - 1973 academic year, and in addition, was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. During the 1974 - 1975 academic year, I taught at California State University Long Beach as a part-time replacement for a regular faculty member on leave, teaching Pre-Petrine Russian History. I completed my dissertation and received a PhD in history in 1981, but by then, owing to the poor prospects of obtaining permanent employment in the academic world, I had begun a new career in information technology. Beginning as a technical writer, I went on to acquire programming skills and became a bona fide software engineer. After a number of years in increasingly responsible positions in the private sector, I entered government employment as a principal application developer with the Los Angeles County Internal Services Department, from which I retired in 2015. Subsequently I moved to Hemet, California, where I pursue various activities such as amateur astronomy and astrophotography, volunteer work with the Western Science Center in Hemet, and maintaining a website to showcase my astronomical and travel photos.