I've been enjoying writing these stories about people who did something profound in their lives and I hope that the people who are reading them are enjoying them as well. It is kind of nice for me to think back on the people who did something exceptional in their lives, or something exceptionally bad.
We all have a path that we take and a lot of the decisions that we make along the way might seem insignificant at the time, but they also could end up defining who we are forevermore. For this next person that I knew quite well, his life took a lot of turns and he spent a great deal of the earlier parts of his life being extremely lost to the point where he had all but given up only to find his true calling in the end.
I like this picture, and I like the article that it is based off of that you can read here if you want to. To many the notion of being lost in life and how that can ultimately lead you to find your true calling might seem a bit dreamy and I don't think that is often the case, but it was for one of my college roommates who for the sake of protecting his professional identity, we will just call Steve.
I don't remember how I met Steve, but we immediately hit it off. We had similar senses of humor and accidentally just hung out at the same places, we had no reason to meet one another academically, because Steve wasn't in college. He had been before, but like a lot of people at East Carolina University, he ended up dropping out because what he was really in college for was to party. ECU is known as a top party school and that is something I will talk about later.
Anyway, for one reason or another Steve ended up not having a place to stay because of a falling out with his roommates at his old place and he ended up staying on our sofa for a while. IT was a long while actually. Eventually we all decided to move into a 3-bedroom place because it was kind of getting old needing to tiptoe around my own living room because somebody was freeloading and sleeping on it well into the afternoon.
Steve wasn't necessarily lazy, he just didn't really ever feel very motivated to accomplish very much. He got jobs doing this and that and he would do the bare minimum at these jobs... just enough to not get fired.
One day I encouraged him to get enrolled in college but then we faced and additional problem: What to study? This is something that in retrospect is perhaps not great advice on my part to encourage him to go to college. I already knew what I was in college for, I was encouraging Steve to go to school just for the sake of going to school. They have "general studies" programs specifically for this kind of person and in many ways I think that simply offering something like this is a bit of a scam. Honestly, what are you paying a lot of money to go somewhere if you don't even know why you are there?
This was the case with Steve. Frequently I felt as though I had to baby him as I would be waking him up so he would go to school. He missed class so frequently that often he would end up dropping the classes because he had missed so much of the coursework and even exams that it was mathematically impossible for him to pass the class. Let me tell you about dropping classes in most American universities: They still keep your money even if you don't finish the class.
All this while Steve was racking up a ton of student loan debt and in many ways I feel that this "free money" was part of the reason why he never took college seriously. He didn't have the foresight to realize - as many of us didn't at the time - that this "free money" was actually a loan that would haunt and has haunted hundreds of thousands of American college students. Steve never felt motivated to go to class or to take class seriously because he, at least at the time, didn't feel like there was any cost associated with it.
By the time I and most of my friends had graduated around the age of 22 or 23 years of age, Steve was already in his early 30's and no closer to finishing a degree than he was 5 years earlier when I first met him.
I kind of didn't like leaving him but I had already done so much to try to help the guy and he just seemed content to waste away and be mediocre for the rest of his life. To make matters worse, Steve's family had no money and he didn't really have anything to fall back on. He was quickly becoming too old to continue doing the bartending and waiter jobs that he had been doing in a college town, and the clock truly was ticking.
Then one day Steve had a brilliant professor that piqued his interest in something that he never thought of having an interest in which was criminal justice. This is a class that is offered to undergraduates no matter what you are studying and it is considered by many to be an "easy A." But in this particular class, Steve ran into a professor that actually gave a crap about their students and was finally able to get through to Steve.
I had never known Steve to have any more than a passing interest in anything that he was studying but he was rather obsessed with the coursework in this class and this can almost entirely be attributed to the one specific professor that was just amazing at his job. I was never in this class and didn't know the professor, but I have encountered some like him in my own studies.
Anyway, Steve ended up having long chats with this professor during office hours (which is something very few students take advantage of) and later on this professor became a close mentor of sorts for my roommate. Steve decided to declare a major of criminal justice and while not every class had an amazing professor (most have pretty terrible ones actually) my roommmate's own interest in the subject matter resulted in him absolutely excelling at all of his coursework. I think that he also had "the fear" at that point in his collegiate career as well because he was often 10 years older than all the other people in his classes.
He graduated with honors in his criminal justice classes where he got nothing but A's, was seen by the entire criminal justice department as being a star student, and was encouraged by many of them to pursue a JD (Juris Doctor) which is a requirement for most of the United States in order to become a licensed attorney.
There was just one thing standing in the way though. His performance for almost all of his non criminal justice coursework was pretty poor and his GPA was around a 2.5 because of it. Also, ECU isn't exactly a prestigious school so the likelihood of him being accepted into a JD program was not so great.
However, since the professors at the university that he graduated from knew that his was a special case, some of them reached out to lessor JD programs in the USA to see if they could find a way to get him in. It worked!
Now here is the hard part. A JD program is extremely difficult and it is also extremely expensive. Steve had to seriously dig around and use all of his connections with the university to find the near $200,000 it takes to get all the way through.
He was finally taking things seriously though because at now, 35 years of age, he wasn't likely to get another chance.
I barely spoke to the guy because he was so busy but every now and then he would pop me an email to perhaps gloat a bit about how all-encompassing being in an educational program like this is.
Well it typically takes 3 years of full time study to obtain a JD but Steve did it in 2 and a half. At his university he was considered a top student there as well. He had completely stopped partying and was focused entirely on academic excellence.
After graduating he sat for the Bar Exam and passed it on the first try. Maybe that doesn't sound so special but many potential lawyers end up needing to take this exam many times before they pass.
It was tough going at first, but he set up a small law firm in the same city that he went to college with me in, and after years went by he started getting larger and larger cases. He was, after about 5 years or so of independent practice, approached by a larger law firm that handles massive cases. I don't know how much money he makes now, but I know it is a LOT.
On a side note I have a certain level of disdain towards lawyers and feel like for the most part they are blood-suckers who make everything more complicated and expensive than they need to be... with one exception.
Steve now has a family and two daughters and lives a very comfortable life. I don't consider myself instrumental in his success, I was just a guy who let him crash on my sofa for about 50 days during a tough time in his life. I am really happy that he met that one professor, because that one guy is the real hero here. It is completely possible that had it not been for that class and that professor, that Steve would have just dropped out of school again and wasted away.
I'm so happy for him today as he truly turned things around.