When I was a kid, I hated school. I guess it was because I was a military brat and we moved every couple of years and, because I’m shy and introverted, I found making friends very difficult. Because I hated school so much, I used to stay up late watching the news hoping and praying for a snowstorm that would get me out of school. I invested a fair amount of time second-guessing the on air meteorologist (people like Al Roker and Willard Scott, who got their starts in the DC metro area and were quite easy for a 10 year old to second-guess), erring especially hard on repeated crippling snowstorm forecasts in the hopes that I could wish them into existence. Eventually, an actual degreed meteorologist named Bob Ryan started working at the NBC affiliate in DC and so I started to learn some actual, credible meteorological skills from someone who eventually ended up being the president of the American Meteorological Society. My mom, thinking that I had an actual interest in the weather, suggested to me that being a meteorologist was an actual profession and that maybe I should point my underwhelming scholastic achievements in that direction.
Out of a sense of profound apathy, I did just that, doing the bare minimum necessary to go to a school that had meteorology as a major. Apparently, I had a modicum of skill in the physical and mathematical sciences and did well enough on my initial placement exams to test into junior level differential calculus even though the most advanced math I had taken in high school was trigonometry and pre-calculus. Never mind the fact that I had no study skills whatsoever and I was entering my freshman year as a young 17-year-old at NC State, a well-known and difficult engineering and mathematical sciences institution.
My first day of class, I show up as that young 17 year old and all the guys in the class had hair on their legs and beards and deep voices and had, apparently, actually gone through puberty. The graduate student TA walks in without saying a word and immediately starts scribbling gibberish on the board and everybody opens up their notebooks and starts scribbling the same nonsense and I spend the next hour and a half looking around and thinking that something was terribly wrong. It was.
My classes for that freshman first semester were that afore mentioned differential calculus, analytical chemistry, quantum mechanics, freshman English and some PE class. I dropped the PE class after a couple of weeks to “focus on the difficult classes“ and proceeded to struggle mightily, basically give up halfway through the semester fall on my face. All the while, keeping it from my dad. I was perplexed as to why my general laissez-faire attitude, which worked so well in high school, was wholly unsuccessful there at NC State. I ended up getting two C’s, a D and an F and my father ripped me out of school after the first semester. I will let y’all guess which class I got the F in. I think the coup de grace for my father was when he called down the night before one of my big exams (for his only call the entire semester) and my roommate told him I was at an REM concert. He was less than forgiving when my grades came just after Christmas and I try to explain away how surprised I was at the difficulty of the classes and how he had not armed me with suitable study skills.
To tie a nice, tidy bow on the story, you know how hard it is to graduate summa cum laude with a degree in physics and a minor in meteorology with those first semester grades on your record? It’s amazing how motivated somebody can become when all support is taken away, they have to pay their own way thru school and have only themselves and their effort as the sharp line between success and failure. That said, I say this knowing that the societal privilege afforded to me as a white male likely played a significant role there as well.
