Melinda French Gates went against the crowd to attend Duke, and she’s proud to be a Blue Devil.
Catholic universities like Notre Dame were popular choices for high school girls with a religious background like hers, French Gate said in her book, “The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward.” Instead she chose to move away from Dallas, where she grew up, to Duke University in North Carolina.
The 60-year-old billionaire philanthropist, who was married to Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates for 27 years, wrote that she assumed she’d follow the path of the Catholic education she’d been on her whole life, but a visit to Durham, North Carolina, changed her mind.
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French Gates “absolutely fell in love” with Duke when she toured the campus in the spring of her senior year, and it wasn’t just because of its beauty.
“It was the gleam of the state-of-the-art computer lab,” French Gates wrote.
She developed an early love for computer science as a kid practicing on an Apple III computer. It fueled her dreams of changing the world. At Duke, the lab had technology that was considered cutting-edge for the time.
“It felt like a portal to the life I wanted,” French Gates wrote.
It inspired her to pursue an education in computer science at the university. However, her first semester after moving into her dorm in 1982 was a “culture shock” for a Texas girl who grew up going to an all-girls Catholic school. In the “Next Day,” she recalled the “brash, arrogant guys” in her class who shouted out answers instead of politely raising their hands as she’d been taught.
French Gates also said she felt unprepared for her first course in computer science. Her professor spoke a different programming language the one she’d excelled at in high school.
“I had no idea what he was talking about,” French Gates wrote.
The ordeal made her doubt her choice — wondering if she’d aimed too high by choosing Duke, she said. Looking back, she wrote, she realized it was a normal experience for freshmen in college.
“If I’d packed up and gone home, transferred schools, and scrapped my plans, there is no question that my life would have been completely different,” French Gates wrote.
She graduated with a degree in computer science and economics in 1986 and an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987.
