I fubared yesterday and mistakingly let out some descriptive details of my life to the public eye.  The post was meant to be a draft though I published it by mistake.  My apologies to any of my audience whom I may have scarred for life.

When it came to early academics – getting ready for college – I didn’t take control of my own life.  My brother did that all for me.  I was too busy dilly dallying with friends and getting in trouble to really worry about college.  He was adamant about the junior year counting so much for college so we basically overloaded my schedule with courses and such.  I think that year I took a couple of APs (but never finished them) and some other elective classes and doubled up on science courses.  I completely bombed my SATs in my opinion – I scored like a 650 on my math and probably just received points on the reading test for signing my name.  Staying back in 5th grade probably would have come in handy here.  I think my overall score was around 1100 (out of 1600).

I set myself up so that my senior year, particularly the second semester, would be free period after free period.  I don’t think I saw my parents for at least a couple of months at that time – I’d stay the night at D’s or B’s or P’s, wake up and drink a beer or choke a troll, go home after both my parents had left for work, shower, then head to public speaking class (which I loved) and I think some other class, then go home and leave before my parents came home from work.  P-A-R-T-why?  ‘Cause I gotta!  I ended up graduating with a 3.0 average somehow.  In Freshmen and Sophomore years, my grades were high As and high Bs.  I didn’t really have any friends that I hung out with on a regular basis during this time aside from peeps in my neighborhood, so I had all the time in the world to actually learn something.  In Junior and Senior years, my grades plopped to low Bs to Cs though I did have the occasional A from easy elective classes.  Public speaking – loved the improv – think of me doing the Eric Gordon Shakespeare play speech.  Fun times.

My brother was at Antioch College at that time but he ended up getting me applications from Earlham, Grinnell, Beloit, Guilford, and Wooster Colleges.  He was dead set on small liberal arts colleges because of the smaller campus (so I didn’t have to walk as much) and the smaller class sizes (could actually set up times to see a teacher and not just a TA).  Of course, I visited all these campuses before applying and I absolutely fell in love with Grinnell which happened to be the only school that I didn’t get into.  Story of my life.  Guilford was a fun school as well.  It’s in North Carolina, it’s warm, it’s small, and furthermore, it was the farthest from immediate family.  My written essay for my Guilford College application was about my summer of 1994 pilgrimage experience to Singapore, India (from South to Himalayas), and Nepal.  The Dean was a hippie so I’m betting that’s what got me in.

At Guilford, I took some pretty tough classes.  I wasn’t prepared for all the writing we had to do in these classes.  I even took this class called Accelerated Calculus.  We had to write papers for this class.  WTF?  How the hell do I write a paper explaining the derivative of this specific function?  I think that’s the only class that got me the .54 GPA standing.  Academically dismissed.  See ya!

From ’95 – ’99, I went to MCC off and on and changed from program to program – I can’t remember the exact order but I believe I went from Biochemistry to Accounting to Engineering to etc.  I went to see a guidance counselor to sign up for classes for the 2nd semester in ’99 and he said that rather than choose a program,  I would only have to take 2 more classes to get a liberal arts associates degree.  Sign me up!  I ended up doing a 2+2 program with Nazareth College.  I should have gone to RIT, it would have been a much better choice from an academic standpoint for what I could have done.  I picked Naz for all the wrong reasons.  Back then the ratio of girls to guys was 5 to 1.  I had fun though it didn’t get me anywhere.