The University of Minnesota

That probably explains why Greg was pretty much oblivious to the concept of cold and bad weather, except in the sense of viewing it as an opportunity. His senior year was spent in the attic of a house (condemned the following year) shared with 11 other guys. Among the wacky entertainments they dreamed up were snow-cycling (riding a bike to class through 12" of new snow), snow-diving (jumping off the kitchen roof into a snowpile), and snow-bedding (kind of like water-skiing except involving a heavy snowfall, an old boxframe and a Toyota Land Rover).

Prior to that he lived in various dorms and was party to certain amusing incidents which don't bear repeating in mixed company.

Nevertheless he persevered in his studies and actually escaped with a few degrees in something like four years. But before that unfortunate event transpired, he spent two years in a magnetospheric physics laboratory run by Laurence Cahill, Jr. Greg started out performing data analysis and programming for the Dynamics Explorer satellites and eventually moved up to Cahill's rocket lab, assembling and testing payloads for sounding-rocket flights out of Greenland and Alaska. Somehow he managed to snag a summer job at Fermilab, too, and spent a month or two helping build a huge drift chamber and falling in love with the open prairie of northern Illinois.

Yes, basically Greg was a complete nerd, but there was hope on the horizon...