My world was microscopically small as a suburban 16 year old. I had never been out of the Chicago area, not to mention out of the country. I had never gone anywhere, really... We went on exactly three vacations during my entire childhood so Galena, Illinois, the Wisconsin Dells, and Coloma, Michigan constituted my universe. I am pretty sure that I can count on one hand the number of times I slept anywhere other than my own bed during my formative years. I do remember once having gone on an overnight cabin camping trip with the Girl Scouts, and my recollection was that it hadn’t really gone so well. This fact will be significant later when my husband tries to get me to go camping as a family. More on that later, though. Now... I am not complaining about how small my world was. It was what it was; I would just like to point out that many, many people go their whole childhood, or even their whole lives, never having left their own home towns for any significant period of time. This, of course, breeds ignorance. And I was supremely ignorant. There was no two ways about that. And because I was ignorant-but-smart, I knew that I was suppose to go to college to try to unshackle myself from the ignorance. But I knew of only one person in our family who had gone away to college. My older cousin Frank (of course). My father had told me that I could go to college “anywhere I wanted to”, but I didn’t know about any colleges. My guidance counselor said that with my test scores and academic record that I could get into “any school I wanted to” but he then neglected to enumerate the options. This happens to be the same guy who told me that I should be a singer, which completely insulted me at the time. I thought, “Who does this guy think I am! Straight A’s, advanced coursework in math and the sciences and because I’m a girl he thinks I should be a singer?! Why didn’t he say neurosurgeon, or particle physicist, or CEO of a Fortune 500 Company?!” But, looking back, I think I may have judged him too harshly. If we had had more than a ten-minute conversation he might have had a chance to explain his thinking and he might have said, “Look, you’re really smart, but pop singers can make a lot of money!” In which case, I may have been influenced into thinking about pursuing a career as a singer. But that was a world that didn’t exist in the suburban midwest. No one I knew was even in a band outside of the school marching band. In retrospect, it is probably a good thing that I was insulted. Art school would have probably driven my parents into bankruptcy.
And so it was that “Any Old University” would do. Luckily, I had one friend who was smarter than me and knew how to take advantage of systems. We were allowed a few days off from school for college visits and thus the plot was hatched to ditch school to visit the University of Illinois. With my friend driving, we left for an all-day trip to Champaign-Urbana - on a FRIDAY!. No parents anywhere to be found. Three hours of singing along with music on the radio, eating fast food, and trash-talking about friends who had declined to join “Joyce and Jackie’s Excellent Adventure.” So, I had never seen a corn farm before, but I sure saw A LOT of them on the way to U of I. In fact, I am 100% certain that a satellite view of Champaign-Urbana at that time would have have looked like a single grey pixel surrounded by vast oceans of green, swaying stalks. Who knew U of I was an Ag school? But when we arrived, Joyce, who had come prepared, got out the schedule for college visitors, and we planned our assault on the unsuspecting campus. First, the quad to get a feel for the “vibe”. Frisbees, hacky-sacks and laughing were observed and checked off the list. Next, a lecture to see what we might be getting ourselves into. Clearly, the school marketing team knew its stuff. Handsome, young, dynamic professor? Check. Then, the highlight of the tour! The cement-fracturing demo. U of I, it turned out, was big in materials sciences and so they would mix up batches of cement and concrete with different formulations, make gigantic, one-to-two-ton blocks, place a block on a special platform, and then squeeze the block with a pressure plate to see how many pounds per square inch of pressure the block could withstand before cracking. The demo moderator explained that sometimes the blocks would simply crack at the sides, sometimes they might split down the middle and, on occasion, one would essentially explode. We watched, staring and holding our breath, secretly hoping for an explosion. But, alas, after about four minutes, a loud pop was heard, a distal-medial fissure was observed, measured, photographed, and fully analyzed. All this in the interest of safer bridges and geeky wonderment. With the results documented and distributed, we left for a quick visit to the student Union to check out the social scene. Engineering dorks? Check. Full-of-themselves business students? Check. Pre-med nerds with their noses in organic chemistry books? Check. Cute, well-dressed sorority girls? Check... ...wait!, Uh oh! What are they doing here? After calming ourselves down and rationalizing that every school had a Greek scene and we didn’t have to participate, we finished our mental tabulations and decided to talk about everything we had seen on the way home. That conversation went something like this: “Seemed good, right?” “Yeah, I think so…?” “You gonna apply?” “Yeah. You?” “Yep.” So it turned out that my cousin Frank had gone to the University of Illinois and so it came to pass that I applied to exactly one school, the University of Illinois. In my utter lack of ability to comprehend that the reputation of the college you went to made any difference at all as far as your future prospects were concerned, I had simply gotten lucky in choosing a good school. Even luckier for the fact that I got accepted since my backup plan was non-existent.
These days, colleges are mostly funnels for particular types of jobs in particular industries. But when I went, it was still ok to figure out what you wanted to do with your life on your parent’s dime. College was a safe place to be exposed to lots of new concepts, develop new interests, take lots of elective courses and learn about the world at large. When I showed up on my first day, I was ignorant, naive, wide-eyed and directionless. I had no idea what it meant to live on my own, do laundry, budget money, or figure out what I was going to eat, let alone what I wanted to do with my life. So, yeah… Pre-med!
I know I told you, and I hope you got the impression that, I really enjoyed high school. I don’t know how I can top that literarily, but I am going to try. Because college was even better! And this was not because of the profound and deep conversations I had with my roommates, or the incredible teaching skills of my amazing professors, or even the sheer amount of information that got crammed into my brain during my college tenure. It was the parties. If you have children that you want not to have read this for risk of them getting the impression that they can skate through college without studying, I completely understand. Feel free to black-out the subsequent sentences or tear out these pages (if you are seriously still killing trees for your reading pleasure), I fully understand.
I attended some epic parties. My roommates and I threw some epic parties. There were hot tubs, cheap beer, ridiculously strong cocktails (some of which were served out of plastic garbage cans), minor feuds with sororities and fraternities that involved stealing mascots and setting random pieces of furniture on fire on front lawns... all the stuff that typically goes on at college parties. But I hung out with really smart people during college, so every party also had something that indicated such. When I hung out with the Evans Scholars, they had videos along with the music before such things were common sights. When I hung out with the computer science geeks, they taught me how to play three-tiered chess (you had to drink a shot every time you captured an opponent’s piece, two if the piece was on a different tier). And when I hung out with the engineering dorks, they had set up an electronically timed light show that was coordinated to the music of Pink Floyd in their dorm hallway. College was awesome! It seemed like this was a time before everyone started taking college so seriously. This, of course, may have been my major problem, however. The whole “not taking things too seriously” kinda bit me in the ass. By the end of Sophomore year, I discovered that there was such a thing as not taking things seriously enough.
My sophomore year, I earned a remarkably low GPA and was placed on academic probation. My major issue, I didn’t study at all. Not one bit. Unless you count cramming for finals, which I do not because that is too little, too late. If it hadn’t been for a good friend who tutored me on how to calculate polar coordinates and set up integral problems, I would have failed calculus Sophomore year. I’m not sure my dad ever found out about this, and I’m certainly not proud of my grades or my lack of motivation, but I will say this in my defense; if anybody with any experience in human development had gotten a hold of me at that time, they would have instantly recognized the symptoms of profound adolescent confusion. Had you met me then, you would have found a human being with a brain still mired in ignorance, completely devoid of any ability to structure her own time, and utterly lacking in any direction. Luckily for me no one ever said, “Hey, why don’t you try putting this little white tab of paper on your tongue. It’ll totally expand your mind!” I might be in a completely different station in life right now had that happened. At some point, before I left for home for the summer that year, I had a moment of clarity, but in my infinite naievity, I walked over to the Engineering Campus, marched into the office, and told the lady behind the desk that I wanted to be a biomechanical engineer even though I had no idea whatsoever what a biomedical engineer was or did. The woman behind the desk smirked and told me it was far too late for me to enroll in the program. The whole exchange lasted 5 seconds and I left, utterly dejected. Do me a favor, if you sit behind a desk at a University, take every kid who walks in the door seriously. I whole-heartedly believe that I would have made an awesome biomedical engineer. Their loss.
Having gotten shot down, I went home for the summer, did another tour at the suburban fiesta pool and, once again, picked classes at random for the upcoming fall. For some reason, I decided to fulfill my social science requirement with Economics 101. When I showed up for the first day of class, I was in my usual happy-go-lucky, lackadaisical semi-funk. Being at UofI meant that, oftentimes, required classes had enormous numbers of students in them and were, therefore, held in the main auditorium. If I recall correctly, there were about 1,000 students taking this Econ 101. I took a spot in a seat about ⅔ of the way back in case I needed to make an escape to the quad mid-session. The professor for this course had excellent ratings, but I hadn’t paid much attention to those things in those days. I was there to get my requirements taken care of and then go hassle the crazy evangelical guy who preached obscure bible passages on the quad. I always got a charge out of throwing verses at him that directly controverted the ones he randomly spewed, so my mind was elsewhere when the Professor started speaking. But after a few minutes I was completely engaged and somewhat awestruck. I hung on every word that came out of his mouth. I was studying the graphs he put up on the screen intently, drawing deep meaning from them. In my mind, supply and demand were coming together in a mathematically, theoretically, and philosophically harmonious singularity. Consumers and producers came together in well-organized markets, competition for resources and the trade offs made in the pursuit of profits and utility created downward pressure on prices. The interplay between inputs and outputs could be optimized at a tangent to the production function. Everything suddenly made sense. I had fallen in love. When class was over, I went directly to the Dean’s office and changed my major for I had found my people. They were called “Economists”.
From that day forward, I literally sat dead-center in the front row of every Economics class I took. I managed to find other disciplines that I enjoyed in the balance of my college career; psychology and the biological sciences also kept me enrapt, as did ancient civilizations, but economics was my deep devotion. I took Comparative Economic Systems and got to learn about Socialism and Communism and other centrally planned economic systems, I took Macro and International Economics... I was so geeked out that when the International professor asked us to write a 10 page paper I was actually excited about it. I even wrote a real live research paper senior year on the impact of the two-party political system on interest rates. A few years later I would see a very similar paper in an officially official economics journal. This should have been a clue into my true inner being, but I was too drunk on the weekends to self-reflect.
I graduated on time with way more credits than I needed and even graduated with honors in Economics. Having absolutely no fucking idea what one did with a degree in economics, however, I moved home. If I had had any brains (or had come from a rich family with connections) I would have moved to New York and started working on Wall Street. Instead, I got a job as an assistant to the processors at a mortgage brokerage in the suburbs where one of my cousins worked and got myself my own apartment. Shortly, I found my way to a job at a large banking institution in downtown chicago. I wore business suits with skirts every day, ate out at restaurants for lunch, and I felt pretty good about life. I had pulled it together somehow and was now on a path to claw my way up a corporate ladder. I had made it.
