With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.