Opinion | Notes from a previously unpromising youngster
What ultimately saved me was the willingness of a man, who happened to be a college admissions officer, to see me as a person. Not as a subpar GPA or a series of unchecked boxes, but as a complicated human being who had had very few opportunities and a lot of bad luck and who had made some regrettable decisions, but who still managed to make something of her life.
Three months after my eviction, I was evicted from my parents’ house. For the next three years, I stumbled through more low-paying jobs—in restaurants, in a factory, in an ice cream parlor, at a burger joint, at a gas station. I sold chef’s knives and pans door to door, magazine subscriptions and makeup. Not old enough or stable enough to sign a lease, I surfed coworkers’ couches, friends’ floors, and sometimes parking lots in my old car.
Eventually I started booking a local rock band. A friend I met through work, a producer and engineer, taught me about contracts and riders, door percentages versus flat rates, marketing and publicity. And one day, when I was 19, he said, with more kindness than the words suggest, “You should go to college. Do you want to be a loser the rest of your life?”
I wasn’t obvious college material. Unlike those world-changing kids vying for a handful of spots at fancy colleges, I had no choice. My only hope would be a college where someone was willing to listen to my story and then take a huge risk on me. That turned out to be a tiny school in the far western suburbs of Chicago called North Central College. That man was Rick Spencer, the head of admissions, who sat me down in his office and listened. I had no letters of recommendation, no SAT or ACT scores, no sports, no extracurriculars. What I did have—and what he asked me to talk about—was motivation, a sense that the bleak life I had been living for three years would be mine forever if I didn’t do something very different.
North Central College gave me a life. I went to graduate school, traveled the world as a foreign correspondent, had a daughter, published several books, and eventually became a professor. None of these successes would have been possible without the man who took a chance on me.
