“I went to community college when I was twenty-one. I just had...

“I went to community college when I was twenty-one. I just had an epiphany that I wasn’t really doing anything with my life. I was staying out drinking until 4 AM every night. I was working retail. I was dating a guy who was a total douchebag. When I told him I wanted to go to college, he told me ‘Let’s be real. You’re never going to pass. Don’t waste your time.’ So at the beginning my whole motivation for going back to school was to prove people wrong. I went to all my classes. I turned in well-written papers, not bullshit ones. And it was hard, but I discovered that I liked the feeling of making good grades. So I started doing it for myself. And I never looked back. I remember taking an anthropology course that first year, and one of my assignments was to write a paper on New York City nightlife. I went to the same bar that I used to go to every night. Except I wasn’t drinking. I was just watching and taking notes. And I saw this girl my age playing beer pong, and she didn’t have a care in the world, and she was stumbling around, and she didn’t realize why the guys were being so nice to her, and she was probably spending money that she didn’t have. And I remember feeling so glad that I wasn’t that girl anymore.”