Pauline worked after school as a sales clerk at the local Sears. By her second year she was starting to see an architecture student from Hong Kong named Lo who would become her first husband. "He worked a little bit in Hong Kong before he came," Lo Alker says, "so he was much older." Eleven years older, to be exact, and several years ahead of her at Arizona State. "They had a few Chinese there," Lo Alker recalls. "There was a very small foreign students club where we would once in a while meet. It was a few people meeting, mostly a lot of people from places like India and Jamaica. I met him there."
Being seriously involved with Lo by then, Pauline wasn't willing to leave Phoenix her third summer for her San Francisco bookkeeping job. Instead she went to summer school at Arizona State and continued to work evenings at Sears. It wasn't until her last year that another, more enduring love would present itself. Her math degree required her to take several classes in the engineering department. Pauline Lo Alker met and fell in love with the computer.
"I loved it immediately," Lo Alker recalls with girlish enthusiasm, displaying more than the usual amount of her choppy Cantonese accent. "I knew that was something I wanted to do, particularly software--that was 1963--not because I had such vision or such intuition about what computers would mean in our daily lives, just because I loved it. I was fascinated by it. It was extremely challenging, a combination of logic as well as art, mathematics, the discipline, as well as composition and creativity. Music and math are very similar, a lot of correlation, so somehow this just hit me. I decided this is what I want to do, no ands, ifs or buts."
[CONTINUED BELOW]
Lo graduated in June 1964, a year ahead of her older brother who had had difficulty settling on a major. She began a discouraging search for a job in the computer industry. "I wanted to stay in Arizona because my fiance was entrenched working in that area. Of course, no one would hire me. I was a foreign student, a woman in a very emerging new industry in a place that was not necessarily a mecca for computer science, so I was not good employment material." Race or sex didn't enter Lo Alker's mind as the possible culprit. "I was dumb enough not to [think about] that. I just thought it was bad luck. Sometimes I felt maybe I wasn't good enough."
After sending out countless resumes, the only job she could find was working as a bookkeeper at good old Sears & Roebuck. Her earnings afforded her an apartment which she shared for a time with her brother to help him out. From time to time she gave him some spending money. She also took it upon herself to begin repaying the debt her parents incurred putting them through college.
"That was a very very dark year in my professional life, the darkest," Lo Alker says. "I had made good grades and worked hard and I saw all my friends graduating and getting offers, teaching here, teaching there and nobody wanted to hire me. So my confidence was totally shaken. I thought, I came to the land of opportunity, but where is my opportunity? I began to question but I never really gave up on my dreams. Every chance I got I pounded the pavement and tried again."
That December Pauline married Lo. She continued with evening computer classes to improve her skills, and on the chance she might meet someone who could connect her with the computer industry. In one class she met a woman who worked precisely where Pauline dreamed about landing a job in, the computer department of General Electric.
"At that time GE had started a computer business and their headquarters was in the outskirts of Phoenix," Lo Alker recalls. "Of course, I had applied there too and couldn't even get through the front door."
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