The Stress of Going to College

Undergraduate Adventures
(Why I didn't become a high school teacher or a prize winning reporter.)

As I was growing up in Ohio, I was an avid reader and writer. I wanted to go to college, but my family didn't have enough money. Then my grandmother died and left me almost enough money to pay for the four years of school it would take me to get a BA degree. I chose to go to Bowling Green State University (see my link), a school about an hour away from home, not because it had a good reputation (Luckily, it did!), but because my boyfriend went there. When I started college, I thought I was going to be a high school English teacher, so I majored in English education, but my first education course changed my mind. I wanted to teach Shakespeare; the professor wanted me to make sock puppets!

Since sock puppets weren't for me, I changed my major to journalism. I was going to write for big city newspapers! But the journalism program required me to take typing. I didn't want to take typing because I was worried that if I knew how to type someone was sure to make me type, and I was afraid that I might end up as a secretary rather than a teacher or a journalist. So being a very liberated young woman, I refused to take the typing course (which I now regret) and changed my major again. Since neither typing nor making sock puppets was required of English majors, that's what I picked.

As an English major, I spent three years reading great books and writing about them. But then the money started running out. I tried to finish before the money did, and I almost made it. Since I had gone to summer school for two summers and I had almost always taken extra classes during the regular school year, I knew I could finish if I just signed up for 20 hours in my last term.

Bad idea! First, the extra classes took the last of my money, so I couldn't afford to buy all of the books for the classes. I also couldn't afford to pay my gas bill, so the company turned off my gas. Luckily it wasn't cold (It was spring term.), but then I didn't have a stove! I learned that I could cook a lot of things besides popcorn in an electric popcorn popper. But it was very hard to take the classes without reading the books. First I dropped one class, which brought me down to 16 hours. A few days later I dropped another class. Now I was only taking 12 hours, the normal course load. Finally, I decided that since I wasn't going to finish anyway, I might as well quit. I dropped out of college, bought a beat-up Volkswagon van, married my boyfriend, and drove to California. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I spent a few years in San Francisco managing a photography store and hanging out in Golden Gate Park before I decided to go back to school, but that's another story.