Main » 2010 January 5 » Flunking Out, Then Flying
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 Flunking Out, Then Flying
College. It's a funny thing. It has been four years since I first moved into my freshman dorm at the University of Connecticut, where I enrolled as a pharmacy major. I had worked at a retail drug store from age 16, and the pharmacists told me that with my interest in chemistry, and my choice of schools, I was a perfect candidate. I felt that it was the right choice, and their six-figure salary didn't hurt either. What I didn't realize was college isn't the same as high school. Where all that you need in high school is to show up, in college you need to engage yourself in the study. I barely opened my books. By the end of my first semester, I was coming close to failing biology and chemistry, the two classes I would need to start my degree. For the first time, in the dead of winter, I walked to the library. It felt as if I was being weighed down by two 40-pound, $150 rocks. I didn't fail the classes, but with D's you don't get into pharmacy school. I was disillusioned with the sciences, so why not give a go at liberal arts? I took every intro class there was. Eastern philosophy, United States history, anthropology. None of the classes worked for me, so I just stopped going to class. I flunked out with a 0.0 grade-point average. My parents gave me a choice: get a job full time or stay in school. Like most people who have worked in retail, if given the choice, you never take the job. So I enrolled at Gateway Community College with mothers who needed a degree to feed their children, the students who didn't have the resources or money to take the SAT's, the other students who got kicked out of school. We were the lost children, just looking for directions to a better life. And that's what I found. Instead of retaking the classes I had failed or done poorly in, I decided to go a new route. I took film history and British Literature II, and the first thing that struck me was the amount the teachers cared. All of my professors worked at the community college because they wanted to teach, not because they wanted to continue research of their own. And so I cared. It was in this semester that my literature professor, James Brogan, changed my life. Maybe it was the works on the syllabus or maybe it was the teaching style, but something clicked. And I remember the exact moment when it clicked. He told us he was going to read a poem, one of his favorites, "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin. When he began to lecture about the poem, it was like hearing my thoughts spoken by someone else. Not the poet's words, but rather, the teacher's words. It was the best semester of school since they took away recess. And when I went to hand in my final for that class, something comparing Larkin to Gerard Manley Hopkins, he told me I had a knack for writing, seeing things in the poems that others didn't see, making connections that others couldn't. This was my second wakeup call in my college experience. I could continue with this community college or try to re-enroll at UConn. Mr. Brogan's words guided my choice. I knew I was smart enough to attend my former school as long as I worked, and within a few weeks I received a notice informing me I was accepted, for the second time. Since then, I've formed this theory about the nature of school, and life in general. All of us here, the human race, spend countless hours searching for the answers. Some of us look for it in our respective religions, some in nature, some in academia. We each make a choice of where to look. Like searching for lost keys, one looks in the kitchen, the other in the bedroom. By getting kicked out of school, a disheartening experience, I found where to look. I'll never attempt to find a Unified Theory of Everything like Steven Hawking, or understand how humans evolved from the apes like Darwin. That's not where I'm looking. It was in the pages of "Moby Dick," or in the mystery of "Hamlet." The epic poetry of Milton or the modernist works of Nathanael West. Each character gets me closer to a greater understanding of the purpose in life, of sadness and joy. Each story has a moral. Each author has a unique vision. I now look at all these disparate visions, combine them, work them around, agree and disagree, and I understand better what it means to be me. Christopher Gilson, University of Connecticut, class of 2010, English major
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