In 1979, when Brin was six years old, his family felt compelled to emigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story,[11] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college". Michael Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities, and that Jews were excluded from the physics departments in particular. Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. He said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."[9] According to Brin, at Moscow State University, Jews were required to take their entrance exams in different rooms from non-Jewish applicants and they were marked on a harsher scale.[12]