Biography|Jeff Bezos — The Engineering Quad Where a Physics Major Changed Course

People treat Amazon as a sudden internet bet made on Wall Street. The training for it happened on this quadrangle. Jeffrey P. Bezos entered Princeton University in 1982 intending to study physics. He had just finished Miami Palmetto Senior High School talking about orbital colonies. The next plan was theoretical work that pointed the same way. The 1986 Princeton yearbook lists him in electrical engineering and computer science. It also lists Quadrangle Club, Tau Beta Pi, and the presidency of the campus chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Princeton Engineering later recorded the same undergraduate degree and the class year 1986. The university and Britannica both state that he graduated summa cum laude. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The switch of major is the documented turn inside this complex. He later told interviewers that a physics problem set made the gap between him and the strongest students in the room obvious, and that theoretical physics is a field in which only a handful of people move the work. No open primary transcript of that hour survives, so this pin keeps to the yearbook, the department record, and the degree. The Engineering Quadrangle still holds the departments he left with, now with later buildings added to the original P-shaped block. Commencement in that era was held on the front lawn of Nassau Hall in early June. The coursework sat here. He left campus for a string of New York jobs, first at a financial-communications startup, then at Bankers Trust, then at D. E. Shaw. The public companies came after that. Photo: Jeffrey P. Bezos in the 1986 Princeton yearbook, Princeton University, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Engineering campus: ajay_suresh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.