Page 40 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

Eastern University, and wanted Wash to promise to teach at the institute upon his
return.

Wash was going to Columbia as well, to study with Roy Bernard Kester, who had also
been Reyes’ professor, and to whom Reyes sent a gift with Wash. Kester was a major
figure in American accounting, having pioneered the idea of a five-year program in
Columbia at a time when some states didn’t even require a college degree for someone
to become a CPA, arguing that “If schooling is the key to being a professional, then
being more professional means being more schooled.” This emphasis on proper
training would rub off on SyCip.

Wash applied to Columbia from the Philippines; Columbia had no idea what UST
was and what its standards were, so it required Wash to score at least a B on his first
semester for his UST units to be credited. “I had no fun that first semester,” says
Wash, who otherwise had no problem meeting the requirement, getting an A on all
his subjects save one, an A-minus.

The rest of his time in Columbia wasn’t easy. He took as many subjects as he could,
including courses in the summer. Accounting subjects were fairly easy for him. What
he found more challenging were courses like Economics, Economic Geography, and
Statistics—subjects that were not emphasized at UST then. “So you really had to
study very hard. I had a lot of readings to do. I had six majors, and finals. I had two
written and four oral exams.” He studied with the best professors; aside from Kester,
he had Frederick Mills—a pioneer in mathematical economics—for Statistics. When
Washington SyCip entered Columbia in 1940, the university was already acquiring
a formidable reputation for toughness; between 1940 and 1956, for example, the
average time spent by a candidate to acquire a Columbia PhD in Sociology was 10.5
years.

Columbia in 1940 was also a hotbed of research, and much of it was work that would
prove useful in the war that was just about to explode. The Manhattan Project that
would result in the atomic bomb was brewing in the university’s Pupin Hall, with the
likes of Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller prowling the corridors. Wallace
Eckert was using IBM’s punch-card machines to compute planetary orbits, and in
1940 came out with the first computer book. The Bureau of Radio Research had also
just moved from Princeton to Columbia.

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