As the story goes, I went to a really good high school in Brooklyn and didn’t try very hard. For 4 years, I had to deal with insufferable parents who felt their status as parents was measured by my grade point average.
That Senior year, I lost 40 pounds and got a little more confidence that when it came to college, I’d try and do better. Yet when applying for colleges, my mother, the bully, insisted I could only apply to the 4 State of New York University (SUNY) Centers and the City University of New York. New York has dozens and dozens of smaller colleges, some very good and some not so good. The cost of applying was $25 per school and the tuition were the same. My mother reasoned that if a SUNY college wasn’t better than Brooklyn, I’d better stay at home in Brooklyn and commute to Brooklyn College. Looking back at it now, that would have been another 4-year prison sentence.
Luckily, the last rated SUNY Center, SUNY at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) accepted me. When it came time for my kids, I knew where they went to school and their GPA didn’t change anything I ever did in my life, it adds or deducts nothing from my accomplishments. When my daughter Meredith applied to college, she probably had 15 schools to apply to, both public and private, from Maine to Oregon. We ended up taking a ride up to SUNY Oswego, and that might be the choice for her, Regardless of what she decides, that’s her call. In the end, you have to break the cycle and not repeat the mistakes of the past, no matter how great Stony Brook was.
