Where did you get in? Where were you rejected?

I, too, have that dream of having booted a semester. Except it actually did happen to me. I skipped about two months worth of astronomy classes my senior year. Hated science, hated the class, just didn't give a shit. In retrospect, it makes me shudder, punting my parents' money like that, but I was a fuckin idiot.

Anyway, sometime around Thanksgiving I got sick enough to miss a couple days of classes. I decide, hey, I'm gonna exploit the hell out of this and tell the guy I've had pneumonia or something for two months and that's why he hasn't seen me since it was 85 degrees out. So I show up on whichever night this class met and tell the guy I've been sick and that's why I haven't been in class.

"I had a heart attack six weeks ago and this is my first day back," he says.

Yeah, I wasn't getting a C out of sympathy in that class. Big, fat F, only because my school didn't give Ks.

 

You win at life.

 

Accepted: LSU, Johnson & Wales, Tusculum College, DeVry Institute
Rejected: None

Looking back, my college selection process wasn't exactly what you'd call "scientific."
I didn't know what DeVry was when I applied. I didn't realize their version of "communications" was "work for the phone company."
One of their reps made a presentation to my health class, followed up with a phone call and I ended up taking their entrance exam. It was 25 math questions. I, no math major, got two wrong (I can never remember which fraction to flip when dividing them). It was fifth-grade math.
The following Monday I saw someone in my homeroom who took the exam the same day as me. He, no rocket scientist, said with a straight face, "Man that test was hard!"
I started looking at other options immediately.

Johnson & Wales and Tusculum offered small scholarships. Tusculum even sent a T-shirt that I had for almost 10 years. I applied to both because they didn't require you to pay an application fee. The small scholarships didn't help much, though, because the tuition was large. A $2,000 scholarship at a $14,000 a year school doesn't go very far.
I applied to LSU because the application fee was only $25, they didn't require you to write an essay, and I knew I had the test scores to get in. They were also one of the few big southern schools that didn't require an ACT score (they only offered the SAT in my neck of the woods). And the out of state tuition was dirt cheap compared to other schools. I ended up going there.

 

Just for kicks, you shoulda told the guy he was full of shit and you were calling his bluff. ;D

 

I did the "stop going to class for weeks at a time" thing many times, sometimes I got away with it and sometimes I didn't.

My favorite was "Introduction to Political Science Research." Brand new teacher, his English wasn't great, and he was very insecure and a total doormat. The format of the class was no attendance policy, entire grade based on midterm and final project.

I got an A on the midterm and stopped going. On the final day of class, I came to turn in a passable, thrown-together final project, only to find out that I'd forgotten that there was a "live presentation" portion to the final project. He let me go that day, I ad-libbed it, got a C on the project and a B in the class.

 

I thought about gettin' into somethin', somethin' with one of those southern schools. They got those fly hunnies, ya dig? They call 'em "Hostesses." I'll be damned if I didn't turn them out the minute they graduated.

 

And we would have been there at the same time, too. BYH and I are about the same age.

 

Maybe you were looking at Point Park for the journalism program? It is supposedly a very good one.

 

The truly hilarious thing? At my school I ended up rooming with a Steelers fan.

 

Knew it before I was out of junior high. Did two years on the student paper there, three years on the high school paper and literary magazine, and was stringing and doing the agate page at the city paper before I graduated.

Interesting that it took until 10 years after high school until I really got into science. That's probably the path I'll take if/when I go back to college.

 

We're everywhere. If you doubt that, check out all the whining on both sides on the current NFL thread.

To answer Bodie's question, I knew I wanted to get into journalism since my freshman year of high school. I wavered a bit as a senior, considering psychology (yeah, yeah..I know), but journalism was option No. 1. So, like an idiot, I went to a major university that did not have a journalism major. What they did have was people who worked in the business teaching most of their journalism courses, a decent school paper and a wide variety of opportunities for internships and freelance work.