Zoltan Kurczveil is living the American Dream
Photograph by Sebastian Widmann
The Secret of his Success
Zoltan Kurczveil keeps promise to help students in situations similar to his
By Kara Chalmers
Zoltan Kurczveil, 24, is great with dates. He remembers the time--down to the minute--that he arrived at the San Francisco International Airport from Germany eight years ago. It was Aug. 20, at 9:15 p.m. The native Hungarian left his family behind in the small German town of Lübbenau to live with relatives he had never met to attend school in the United States--at Saratoga High School.
"They invited me for America," he said. "And you know how that is, when you live in a small European city."
"I didn't like it very much," he said of Lübbenau.
When he went home for the summer after being here for a year, Kurczveil noticed everything seemed much smaller--and poorer. When his relatives asked him to come back to Saratoga for his senior year, he said he gave it about 10 minutes' thought before saying, "OK, great."
He also remembers receiving the acceptance letter from UC-Berkeley in March 1994. And he clearly remembers getting his tuition bill one month later--$21,000 for the first year, including room and board.
While his cousins Stephen and Raine De Keczer in Saratoga had helped Kurczveil fill out applications for colleges in the United States and signed him up for the SATs, Kurczveil still thought he would probably go back to Europe.
"But then I got into Berkeley," he said
Unfortunately, at the time he had $184 in the bank.
"You get your acceptance letters in March and you're excited," Kurczveil said. "And then in April, they throw reality at you."
Being a foreign exchange student, Kurczveil was not eligible for many state and federal grants for college. He did not receive other forms of financial aid that he applied for, either. And with this status came the student visa, which did not allow him to work in the United States. Nor did his parents have the money to send him to school.
"No matter how much I looked at it, short of a lottery win, there was no way on earth that I was gonna get there," Kurczveil said.
So he took matters into his own hands. He sat down with the yellow pages the following Sunday and wrote 410 letters to attorneys, doctors, dentists, presidents of companies and the two California senators. In the letters, he explained that he had a 4.13 GPA at SHS and that he graduated with high honors. A B+ in physics was his only B--all his other grades were As throughout high school.
In the letters, he asked that each person contribute just $25 so he could go to Berkeley. He also promised that after he graduated and when he became successful, he would help students in similar situations.
He spent about $300 on paper, envelopes, postage and ink cartridges, and he made about $200 back. After a newspaper columnist wrote about him in April 1994, Kurczveil began getting a better response.
"I was doing this basically through May, through June, July, August and that was really one of the best times in my life," he said. "I would just go to the mailbox every day, get a stack of $25 checks, go to the bank, sign them all and deposit them."
He said a lot of the people sent him money in memory of sons who had died. People wrote him about how hard they had to work to put themselves through school.
"They told me this was going to be the best adventure of my life," he said.
Photograph by Sebastian Widmann
Zoltan Kurczveil enjoys driving around Saratoga in his new convertible sportscar.
A lot of people requested personal meetings with him. Two young children sent him their combined monthly allowance. A couple of Berkeley professors sent him checks, as did the secretaries of Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer (although neither senator sent him money).
Some people wrote him back trying to persuade him to go to community college, or to try to get loans, as one student whose letter had a huge pizza stain on it. There were also people who wrote telling him not to even consider community college.
By June, Kurczveil did not yet have enough to live at school, but he had enough to demonstrate that he could pay tuition. His parents had sent him about $6,000 and with all the $25 donations, he was able to get a student visa for college.
He next obtained a phone book of all the Hungarian people in the Bay Area and began sending letters to them. Many said they didn't trust him, but many others sent him money gladly. On July 20, Gyula Sziraczky from the Armus Corporation, a software company in Burlingame, wrote him a letter saying that he had a job for Kurczveil.
Kurczveil couldn't work yet, since he did not have a work permit to go along with his visa, but he called the man and began helping him with some programming. He worked through August and did not take payment. Instead, he took Sziraczky on a good faith offer that he would help him with his tuition in the future. Sziraczky gave him the $25 donation and helped with Kurczveil's paperwork to get a work permit, which he obtained in the fall.
A week or two before school started, Kurczveil realized he had no idea how he would get there. Luckily, Sziraczky had an old 1978 Peugeot he sold to Kurczveil for $1.
Kurczveil was very grateful, but the old car gave him months of grief. He has since become an expert in car repair. Kurczveil drove 30 miles to Fremont every day and took BART to Berkeley. There were many days the car overheated and broke down. Finally, in December, it blew up. Kurczveil had no money to get it fixed.
In the meantime, he had finished what turned out to be a perfect semester at school. He began his college career as a chemical engineering student and took classes five days a week that first semester. The commute was draining but his grades were impeccable--straight A's.
"It was a lot of work and everything, but it was fun," he said. "When you are a student and you have nothing in the world, basically everything that you are faced with you just look at as a possible gain, because you really have absolutely nothing to lose. And so if you go into things with that kind of attitude, you can really make a lot of good things out of bad."
He worked about two afternoons a week at Armus, for about $500 a month. Later he got a raise to $1000. He sometimes stayed at work until 3 a.m.
The following semester, his cousins let him use one of their cars to get to and from school, a 1974 Volkswagen. That summer, Kurczveil worked at Armus, as he did every summer and the money he made there partly took care of his tuition for the next three years. He said he knew he could always ask Sziraczky for help with money.
"To this day, we have a really, really good understanding of each other, and, honestly, I don't know any other person among my friends who has as good of a relationship with his boss as I do with mine," he said. "I know that I could have never, ever finished school without his help and so whenever I got the opportunity, I sent him a thank you card about everything."
He received money from his parents, as well. In fact, they gave him all the money they had saved up to that point--some $10,000.
Kurczveil graduated from Berkeley in December 1998 with a major in physics and a minor in computer science.
"A lot of people look at this as my achievement, but it was really the achievement of my host family here, my cousins, definitely my boss, and my parents, who helped me financially, too," he said.
"If you would have taken away any one of these parts, it wouldn't have happened. Then I also had these hundreds of people who sent me money and if you take away those, it wouldn't have happened. I cannot imagine a bigger community effort than getting me through Berkeley."
That December, Kurczveil's younger brother Tamas came to live in Saratoga, as well, on the day of Kurczveil's particle physics final exam. Tamas just graduated from SHS this spring.
Today, Kurczveil's parents and youngest brother still live in Germany in the same town. Since that first summer after his junior year at SHS, Kurczveil has only returned home three times, once in 1996 when his boss paid for a round-trip ticket for his birthday, in May 1999, and also in June for three weeks, 10 days of which he spent working at Armus' engineering office in Hungary.
He says he misses his family but that he gets over it.
"Just like everything else, it comes in waves," he said.
For Kurczveil's college graduation, Sziraczky gave him a gift-- a $5,000 scholarship to be given in Kurczveil's name annually to a high school student with an interest in math and science. The gift allowed Kurczveil to make good on his promise to help out students in situations similar to his.
Support from his Saratoga cousins Raine and Stephen De Keczer (rear) played a big part in Zoltan Kurczveil's success story.
Photograph by Sebastian Widmann
SHS student Adrienne Osborne, 18, was this year's recipient of the Zoltan Kurczveil scholarship. She will attend UC-Davis' engineering school in the fall as a freshman, although she has enough credits--from AP tests and classes she took at De Anza College--to be a sophomore.
According to the award, the recipient must have excellent academic standing and a strong interest in sciences or engineering disciplines. Osborne said she would major in civil engineering and materials science. The vice chairwoman of the civil engineering department has offered her a position on a research team, so she will be working with grad students on environmental engineering projects. She is considering a third major in languages.
Osborne's scholarship will pay for her tuition, books and supplies for an entire year. She says now she won't have to get a job that would take a lot of her time, so she can spend more time studying.
Today, Kurczveil is the director of Research and Development at Armus, which is based in Burlingame. The company has offices in Budapest, Hungary and Dallas, Texas. As soon as he graduated from college, he took a full-time job there. He leads a development team that works on the database program that Armus sells, concerning cardiothoracic surgeries.
Kurczveil is a Hungarian citizen but a permanent resident of Germany. He says he never wants to leave the United States, and his company has sponsored him for a working visa. Once he obtains it, he can get his green card, and then he can apply for citizenship.
"I am definitely, definitely going to stay here," he said. "And even if I do make up my mind to go back there, I think I'd go back there for a month, and I'd come right back.
"You realize, when you live here, how many things in the world really just take place here in Silicon Valley. You really realize that this is the driving place of virtually everything, so that was the thing, that was what really made it obvious that I'd like to stay here."
Kurczveil has now been working full time for a year and a half. In that time, he has been saving to send his brothers to college; he also sends money home to his father. A few months ago, he bought a car--a 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible. It's silver with a black top. But he said he feels guilty about it, especially since going back to Hungary in June, where he saw that his friends, while working very hard, were not doing well financially.
"I come from a family where we definitely were not rich. I was brought up with very reasonable financial restrictions," he said. "There was definitely an appreciation for money when I had it, but I didn't really miss it when I didn't have it." He said that going through college with almost nothing helped him realize that while having money is nice, there are a lot of things that are more important.
Kurczveil's cousin Raine said that Kurczveil epitomizes what caring about oneself means.
"It means being able to choose the best, stick with something and go forward with your goals--do the things that you really want. I think that he's just a real success story," she said.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
