I have often said that I went to the wrong school. Gettysburg College definitely wasn't the right fit for me. In high school, I had tunnel vision about what I thought I wanted and I went with it. The Civil War was an intense interest for me as was the sport of wrestling, and Gettysburg College had both. Bad things happen when you don't focus on the complete picture. You lose sight of the things that actually matter to your personality when it comes to school. Sure Gettysburg had a Civil War Era Studies minor. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the only school that offers one. The college even had a wrestling team that I was part of for two whole weeks. Academically, it wasn't the right fit for me, though, and I didn't learn that until too late.
In my first semester at the school I had a 1.83 GPA. I thought I wanted to be a Chemistry major. Boy, was I wrong. I did alright in high school chemistry, but it didn't prepare me at all for what we would be doing at the college level. That class, single-handedly, ruined my college career. It's hard for your GPA and self-esteen to come back from getting a D- in your first semester at college. It also didn't help that my attempt to major in music didn't pan out either. It's not that I didn't do well in my music class. I did. My professor accused me of plagiarism and my self-esteem took another body shot. It's hard when a professor doesn't think that something like picking my own topic for my final project could inspire we to write at great length and detail on my own. Luckily, I found a new interest that semester: Political Science.
That interest lasted me up until my final semester of what should have been my junior year. I was forced to take a class that I didn't want to, because there was nothing else to take. I ended up suffering from a severe depression that caused me to withdraw from 2 classes and flunk one other. This may have been partially due to my lack of motivation that year. I had no desire to be at school and was considering the option of dropping out. I was in love with the pay I received from my manual labor job over the summer. I loved the work I did and was proud of it, which wasn't something I could really say about Gettysburg.
Everyone out there who has left their entire world far away knows how hard it can be to adjust to the new world they encounter. It was definitely hard for me to adjust to life at Gettysburg. No one from my high school decided to attend there with me, my family (with whom I am really close) were all at least 5 hours away, my dog that I had gotten for my 6th birthday died just a few weeks into the semester, and I had only a handful of friends. I really missed everything about Connecticut. Most of my close friends attended the University of Connecticut, which I had thoroughly dismissed as an option of a college education. One thing I learned quickly about college is that drinking was a good time, but only if you had the right people to do it with and the right setting to do it in. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until the first time I decided to visit my friends up at UConn.
It was Easter weekend my sophomore year at Gettysburg, and I was feeling utterly homesick. My friend Greg and I decided that since I got some time off for Easter, I would visit him up at UConn on Holy Thursday and bring him home to Naugatuck on Good Friday for the weekend. I got up there some time in the evening after borrowing my grandmother's Subaru for the weekend. This was my first encounter with UConn culture and the dorm lifestyle they had there, which was actually quite different than what I was used to in Pennsylvania. The first new person I met was Greg's roommate Steve, who I didn't really see much of that night because it ended up with me sleeping in a chair, covered in my own puke. I also met Brett, who convinced me to eat dinner with them because he was so excited it was "Baseball Night" at the dining hall. Corn dogs, chicken fingers, hot dogs, anything associated with what you might buy at a baseball game to eat. Who could have said no to that?
It was a very different culture that what it was at Gettysburg. At UConn, all of your friends lived nearby. This is not so at Gettysburg, especially after all of your friends get bids into fraternities and are spread out all over campus. There's no way to hang out as much. Not at UConn. It seemed like any time you wanted to chill or do work with someone, they were right around the corner or across the hall. My friend Joe lived right across the hall from Greg, and even came and hung out and drank with us. Drinking was more done with friends at UConn, instead of going out and being rejected at the door of some fraternity, drinking at the first place that let you in, standing off to the side while the brothers danced with the only girls there. It was awful.
It was just nice to experience something different when I visited my friends. Even though the night ended up in black out and embarrassment for me (I got an honorary "Trainwreck of the Week award that night), I was still invited to come back and visit. Good Guy Greg.
After the year of class withdraws I decided to take a semester off and reassess what I wanted to do with my career and life. That summer, I interned at a radio station and rekindled my love for music and broadcast. I really wanted to do that as a career and make that my major. I had lost interest in politics and radio had kept my interest for years. I had been involved in the station on campus since my freshman year and was even on the exec board for it. Because of this, I decided that I might want to transfer to a school that had a communications program. Gettysburg didn't offer communications as an area of study. Naturally, I gravitated toward UConn as where I wanted to spend the rest of my college days, but my GPA wasn't high enough to get in. I tried other schools, as well. Ultimately, I ended up returning to Gettysburg with my tail between my legs.
I was considered a weekend warrior by one of my UConn friends during that semester off. I spent it working for my uncle doing hardwood floors, but on the weekends, I would take my Honda Civic and drive up to Storrs and go to all of the home football games. It seemed as if I was up there every weekend just to hang out. It was the most connected I had ever felt to a university, and I didn't even go there.
I went back to Gettysburg, but my first semester back had left me feeling as if the few friends I had there had forgotten my existence and was left to do things on my own. I even drove the seven hours up the east coast to visit my friends just because I felt Gettysburg had nothing to offer me. On weekends where I didn't do that, I would go visit my uncle Gene down in Virginia. Just a 2 hour drive. It was hard for me to deal with a school that I cared nothing about. I did extremely well in my classes that semester, but I think it was mostly due to my friends at UConn and my uncle. I was finally responsibly enjoying my time at school and getting my work done. It was also that semester that I discovered the wonder that was my Writing minor. It helped relieve a lot of the stress I had about going back to school in a creative outlet. I loved it. Perhaps it was that connection to the college that improved my morale there.
Spring Break for Gettysburg and UConn usually coincided, but not that year. I was pretty upset about that. The whole week, though, I was glued to my internet and TV because of the Big East basketball tournament. The UConn Men's team kept winning. My Honda died in the Gettysburg College parking lot, so I ended up taking a train home that Friday. Session seven of the tournament was that night and I knew Steve (with whom I have become friends since the fateful night of the puke) and Greg were going to be in New York City. The train went from Harrisburg to New York City, and I waited in Penn Station for them. For whatever reason, they convinced me to buy a ticket to that night's game and we ended up in attendance. A win that night guaranteed them to play in the championships. So Greg and Steve again convinced me to buy a ticket for the next night, when UConn made HI5TORY. This was an incredible win streak that ended up in a NCAA Championship.
This was a big deal that I would never experience going to a Division III school. Or so I thought.
Because I took time off from Gettysburg, I was a year behind all of the friends with which I had entered college. This worried me because I needed to find some new friends and something to occupy my time. I found rugby. Fraternities are huge on the Gettysburg College campus. About 90% of upperclassmen are involved in Greek Life. I was never in one, but I did join the fraternal order of the rugby player. These guys would be some of the best guys that I would ever know. Both on and off the field. I quickly made new friends some of whom I still see on a regular basis. One of the Gettysburg captains and I play for the same rugby team back up here in Connecticut.
Big Don, as we affectionately called him because of his height and muscularness, and I became solid friends and were constantly hanging out on the weekends at his fraternity house (shout out to my friends at Phi Kappa Psi). He became one of my best friends and was one of the main reasons why my senior year at Gettysburg was possibly my most socially successful. I had great friends to hang out with all the time.
Quick digression: Don broke his ankle early in the spring semester, so he couldn't play rugby, but we still hung out all the time. We would watch movies a lot. I remember when Don, Allan and his abs, and I watched this movie
Rubber one night and it was ridiculous. I really should include some of our shenanigans in another blog post.
Everything that happened during my final year at Gettysburg made all the crap I dealt with up until that point... well... It made everything worth it. While I may have said that I picked the wrong school, I'm kind of glad I did. I would never had met some of my best friends. I would never have played a sport that I have grown to love so much. And I would have never experienced what it was like to feel pride in work that I actually cared about.
Top Row: Brad, Don, Karl
Wrestlers: Me (white), Tim (pink)
