Patrick Lapid


Sophomore, computer engineering/sociology

Information zips around the globe today with the greatest of ease. Indeed, thinking about the interconnectedness of our world can be a bit "mind-boggling," in the words of sophomore Patrick Lapid. But it's not daunting enough to deter Lapid from wanting to plunge his hands into the Internet's innards to find out how it all works.

Lapid is part of the fearless new generation of students who have known computers all their lives. "I wasn't like a mini­Bill Gates or anything," Lapid says modestly of his childhood. Nevertheless, his aptitude for math and science and his drive to use the Internet for societal good have brought him to UCSC as a budding computer engineer at the new Jack Baskin School of Engineering.

Lapid grew up in working-class Vallejo, northeast of San Francisco, the son of parents who immigrated from the Philippines in 1970. Many students of color attended his crowded high school, but the best resources went mainly to honors students. "There was potential for many of my classmates to go to UC," Lapid says. "They just needed someone to motivate them."

Through the Filipino Student Association (FSA), Lapid and his friends try to do just that. They bus high school students to UCSC to give them a taste of college life. FSA members also contact Filipino students who have been admitted, just as Lapid was called two years ago. That helped nudge him toward UCSC over the other four UC campuses that sought him, including Berkeley and UCLA.

Lapid likes UCSC's strength in liberal arts--he's also major- ing in sociology, with an emphasis on racism and class-ism. He finds time for Lambda Phi Epsilon, a national Asian American interest fraternity, and for tutoring in computer science and math. Last year he danced with Pagkakaisa, a Filipino troupe.

With these talents and a stellar academic record to boot, it's easy to see why Joel Ferguson, chairman of the Computer Engineering Department, says Lapid will have his choice of labs to join as an undergraduate researcher. He hasn't yet picked a faculty mentor, but Lapid plans to focus on networks: optics, routers, switches, and the like--the hidden guts of
the burgeoning Internet.

On one level, Lapid sees himself "tinkering with hardware" to improve the networks of tomorrow. But clearly his motivation cuts deeper than that. Advanced communication tools, he believes, offer great promise to level the playing field. In his view, the wired world may grant what the world at large does not: equal access to information, via a medium where prejudices and misconceptions don't exist.

--Robert Irion


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