Not too long after coming home from Europe I was about to move into my first apartment and start school at Eastern Michigan University. I’d spent the 2 years prior going to Mott Community College in Flint and trying to get all my basic classes out of the way. This was the plan that I had kind of proposed to my Dad a few years back. Community college was just highschool but not my highschool it was more like what we saw on TV shows where you rarely saw people in class but you would always see them sitting out in the quad. Of course since I went to school in Michigan and not California people were only hanging out on the quad about a quarter of the time. Community college was fun because there were a lot of high schools around town and if people went to community college then they probably went to Mott. The classes were good and I felt like I had a pretty firm grasp on what was going for and which classes I was taking and why. I was going to school for Marketing.
It’s funny I remember a few years back when I was in High School we had career day and it was ok. You basically went to the career lab and talked to this lady about your interests and told her what you were passion about and then you had to take a short quiz on the computer. I remember answering all the questions and then I clicked submit and it printed out my results. I imagine that some people got things like fire fighter, retail store manager or normal things. Me on the other hand, I could never get something normal. No police officer, magazine editor, designer, for me it was Acrobat. The machine told me that I should become an acrobat. Thinking back I don’t recall any questions on quiz like “Do you enjoy doing flips”, “Do you often tumble gracefully”, “Have you ever walked on a wire”. Nothing like that but somehow someway I get Acrobat. I remember the lady printing it out and just looking at it and then looking at me with this face of confusion mixed with disappointment. It was a pretty awful experience.
So I was taking classes in the marketing program which was like Marketing, Management, Advertising and stuff like that and it was awesome. I loved it and I was pretty good at it. It was community college so it was pretty easy. I think I learned a lot there but not really about marketing so much but more about navigating the system, balancing time and effort with my classes as well as working full time and playing in a band.
So after 2 years of going to Mott Community College I did the Euro tour then in the fall I headed off to Eastern Michigan University to live with Phil and finish up school. I think I have talked about this is some other episodes but Eastern is located in Ypsilanti MI which is right next to Ann Arbor where the University of Michigan is located. Eastern is a pretty typical University campus it had a lot of the same things that Mott had but it was way bigger and there were lots of dorms so everything seemed much farther away and parking was a total nightmare. I remember these commuters would show up in the parking lot like 3 hours before their class so that they could find a spot. They would just sit in their cars and read and study and wait for someone to pull out. I would call them hawks because they are just circling their prey and waiting for them to move to they could pounce on their spot.
So this was 1998 and the internet was a thing but nowhere near as versatile as it is today. Today when you go to register for your classes you go on to a website and add the class numbers or search for the classes and once you find the class there is all this information in the body talking about the class. Things like how many credits it is, the days and times that it’s offered, any p...
