By the end of her first year, Seltzer says she realized that even at Harvard she could make a difference.

"Freshman year was this period of discovery that even in this very big pond one can have impact," Seltzer says. "If one is good at things at Harvard one can have impact...being a leader at Harvard, getting people to follow you [and] helping people to learn."

Returning to Harvard

After graduation, Seltzer left Harvard and joined a young start-up company with a Harvard professor who had just been denied tenure. During her first four years out of college, she worked in three separate computer start-up companies.

Seltzer describes herself as "a systems person," meaning she designs the layer of software between the computer hardware and user applications. Seltzer is best known for her work on file systems which must efficiently transfer data between applications and a storage medium like a hard disk.

By 1986, Seltzer says, she was unhappy with her job and her GRE scores were about to expire.

One day that year, while wandering through Harvard Square, she ran into a former student who had been in one of her sections when she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. The conversation brought Seltzer back to teaching.

"It was actually a moment of revelation," Seltzer says. "It was a wonderful conversation. It brought back the thrill of teaching that I really enjoyed."

So she decided to apply to graduate school, and in 1988 Seltzer enrolled at Berkeley.

Four years later, on April Fools Day, the Dean of the Division of Engineering Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin offered Seltzer a job, though Seltzer says jokingly that she had never applied for the position.

"I had applied retroactively for the position without even knowing it,"

But Harvard had been courting Seltzer for some time.

While working on her Ph.D. in 1991, Seltzer was asked to give a recruiting talk at Harvard. At the time Harvard did not have any job openings, but Lewis set up appointments for Seltzer with several of the computer science faculty members.

A junior faculty position opened up a few weeks later when McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Sciences H.T. Kung decided to come to Harvard, and Harvard decided to have Seltzer apply for the job.

"I got this charming little note from [Lewis] with the job announcement with the tag-line that said, 'I am so glad to see you applied,'" Seltzer says. "They had all my materials from when I came up and gave this talk."