When you grow up in Chicago, your whole family is counting on you to go to college and do something distinguished. The last thing you're thinking is that you're going to make a career in show business.
Many of the scrappy young people I meet who are the first in their family to go to college feel that they have to bring home a steady paycheck to make their family's sacrifices worthwhile.
I know that college is a big step from high school. So I wanted to make sure I was ready for it.
I always knew when I graduated from high school, I'd go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from... I just wanted to study literature and writing.
I was studying theater management, business stuff. About that time, I realized I really didn't like that, and it threw me into a panic attack a little bit. I was under the assumption that the first job you get out of college is the job you have for the rest of your life.
When I arrived, I felt the spotlight shining brightly on me, and I knew the sharks were ready to strike if I did not pan out and prove myself to be the showman and the player the college ranks had labeled me to be.
If college expectations are not taught at home, teach them in school.
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.
It was always like there was no doubt in anybody's mind that I was going to UCLA, so once UCLA started recruiting me, everybody started pushing me there.
I definitely think there's a lot of pressure for teenaged girls and guys to hook up on prom. I think it comes with the belief that you have to lose your virginity before you go to college. It's a coming of age thing. I think it's really sad because it has nothing to do with what you want and everything to do with peer pressure. But it comes with the territory of prom. Thankfully more and more kids are knowing their limits, and I think we're raising kids to be really good people, and they're realizing that they don't need to do it just because.
A lot of people think you go to a top college, you come into the NBA and it'll be all a breeze and easy. It's not like that.
I cannot even imagine college. I'm white-knuckling it just letting my son go to kindergarten for eight hours a day.
I went into broadcast journalism. I loved every class I took, I just got anxious because I came to the realization that you're groomed in high school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college or else you're done for.
It's not easy for a freshman, especially not at Duke.
It was sort of assumed, from the time I was born, really, that I would go to college. That's sort of the way that Jewish families in New Jersey handled things; that was the norm.
My parents weren't stereotypical and pressuring me to go to college. They mentioned it a lot and constantly, but it wasn't a do or die thing, like, 'You have to do this or you're done.'
You know, in college, your second year they expect you to have a sophomore slump.
i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
I didn't want to study theater or go to school in the city. I wanted the all-American 'Here's your quad' college experience.
The vast majority of kids in my school went on to college. That's just what you did. And I remember feeling like, 'No, I'm not doing that.' The idea that college was next, that it was a given, meant it was of no interest to me. So I didn't go.
When you sign your letter of intent to go to college you kind of sign away, and understand that you have certain rules and obligations that you have that normal students don't have... it's part of the process, being apart of the university and what you represent.
I'm so disappointed in the frat parties at Columbia. I'm like an English boy going to an American college. I'm thinking cheerleaders, I'm thinking kegs. That's not what's on the cards.
You're supposed to be challenged in college.
You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.
