Lessons from Higher Learning

My folks shipped me off in a truck full of furniture 4 1/2 hours down the road to Carbondale in August 2003.  It was my first apartment, living with two of my good pals from Lincoln College, DP & Chase.  

Now, I had a job working at the PBS TV station on campus, my own place & a full load of business & math classes to tackle.  A much different outlook from a summer spent without a steady job & living at home with my parents at age twenty.

Looking back, it was an exciting time- everything so fresh & new.  Yet, the classes I had to enroll for that first semester at SIU were also a mystery.  I still don't understand what Calculus & Finite Math have to do with running your own business, but for my Business Science major with a minor in Entrepreneurship they were required courses.  

I got through that first fall with straight "C's" & all things considered, I was pretty proud of myself.  I had heard plenty of tales of students who flunked out of Southern after only one semester.  

A professor at Lincoln had once told our class, "That's the most important lesson of college- learning to finish something.  Well, that & you'll learn far more outside of the classroom that you will ever learn inside of one."