I had higher math SATs than in English - yet I became an English major in college.
I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.
I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.
As a college freshman with an on-campus job, I was delivering paperwork to the engineering department one day. There, I encountered two department assistants whose faces lit up with the hope that I was a prospective student. I hadn't come there to enroll, but their reactions piqued my interest.
When I was about to enroll for my third year of college, I ended up dropping out and moving to Nashville.
'CSI' has not only remained a top-rated show through seven seasons; it has had real-world consequences. Police and prosecutors complain of a 'CSI' effect' that leads juries to demand more physical evidence than they used to expect. College officials use the same term to describe spiking enrollment in forensic-science programs.
In college, my friends called me Mr. James Bond 007 because I entertained everything: blonds, brunettes, redheads. I'm across the board.
We got to think of other ways to help these kids out because there's a lot of kids who get hurt in college and then don't make it to the NFL and don't have insurance, and their entire lives are changed when they put their bodies on the line for their school.
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A's through college, with the exception of two B's in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.
I led the state in defensive interceptions my senior year, with seven in nine games. Then I went to Montana to play basketball and found out quickly that my college career wasn't going to work out how I'd envisioned it.
As a child, I envisioned a career in the hard sciences. In sixth grade, I was buying college chemistry textbooks.
I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
I'm sort of agnostic. I grew up Catholic and switched to Episcopalian in college because I sang in churches to have money to buy pizza and french fries.
I kind of got more interested in writing after I turned in my last college essay and nobody was going to tell me what kind of academic papers to write anymore. I could write whatever I wanted, and I realized that I actually liked it when I could choose what I would write.
At Trinity College there was a coterie of the poshest of the posh, people you didn't ever see, they were so posh. They went to each other's rooms and, at weekends, each other's estates. I preferred to be with the weirdo bunch of raggle-taggle thesps.
I think when you come from a small college like I did, then you have to use every opportunity available to you.
Coming from college, where they tell you exactly what you have to do, and they tell you have to be at this at this time, you kind of get punishment for that. Now you're in the NFL, and you have to do it on your own.
In the course of my life, for more than half a century, June 1989 was the major turning point. Up to that point, I was a member of the first class to enter university when college entrance examinations were reinstated following the Cultural Revolution (Class of '77).
Part of the reason I went to college was that I wanted to fade out peacefully: show everybody I had gone through something that was quite challenging and difficult but did so with grace and poise and got an education.
