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When I was five years old, I wanted to grow up to become a video game designer.

When I was seven, I wanted to become a professional basketball player.

Ten, a singer.

Sixteen, a rapper.

At seventeen, I just wanted to be happy, so I never went to college.

I never went to college but I had fun in elementary school.

Although my mother spent a lot of time at home, teaching me the basics of English and Math, I learned some unfamiliar words in the English language and enjoyed participating in spelling bees. My mind was lightning fast in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. My hands would always shoot up to solve a math problem and when the teacher would pick students to come up to the chalkboard, it was my time to show off!

Learning was fun, or should I say, showing OTHERS what I knew.

By the time seventh grade came around, I started to lose interest.

Part of it had been me just trying to fit in and be accepted by my peers. In Philadelphia, being known as the braniac wasn’t cool. I didn’t waste time cluttering my mind with American history, I didn’t care. The past is the past and we can’t change it. I guess that makes for the perfect repetitive curriculum. Not for me, all that mattered is the future. Primarily, trading Pokémon cards at recess.

Surprisingly, I was excited for high school upon graduating eighth grade. I had gotten accepted to the I.T. academy at Abraham Lincoln High in northeast Philadelphia. I never went to to college because unfortunately, just a few months after arriving, my flame was extinguished.

I never went to college because my high school roster was full of crap courses I had ZERO interest in.

My only IT classes were Intro to IT and a basic web design class. Sure, I started out reaching for the roof to answer questions from Mr. Blitzstein, whom I highly respected, but soon I asked myself, “What’s the point?” I became quiet and gave the other students a chance to blurt out incorrect answers.

Instead of beginning my assignments when I came in at 8am, I launched Safari and began to browse online things that interested me. The class obviously didn’t, I already knew the things that were being taught but since most of the other students didn’t, so I had to suffer. I felt as though they were holding me back.

I never went to college because after my freshman year, I had written my own roster.

Each phase of schooling was lamer than the last and high school SUCKED, so I never went to college.

I attended the classes I wanted to attend, which in most cases wasn’t a class I was supposed to be in. Otherwise, I walked the halls. I had decided to brush up on my social skills and work on my foot speed while evading school security.

Major courses that didn’t interest me were saved for the summer. Why not? The classmates I never met would gruel through one-hundred-eighty-one days of that nonsense. I was perfectly fine with spending eighteen summer mornings in a classroom to be rewarded with the exact same credit. That’s what I call working smart, another reason why I never went to college. The only downside was that each student was limited to just two make-up classes. So for the other two major courses, I did just enough to get by. Just enough was passing with D’s. I never went to college because I wasn’t going into debt to pass with D’s.

The rest of my high school career went just like that.

I spent most of my time in the lunchroom dueling Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, in the hallways or playing basketball in a gym class that I didn’t belong in.

I decided to do the things that interested ME, so I never went to college.

I wasn’t a dumb kid by any stretch, there just wasn’t anything there for me to learn. Cutting open frogs and learning the periodic table would’ve been perfect for an aspiring animal surgeon or Dexter’s Lab fanatic. I would much rather play Cops and Robbers with the school security or ride a projector cart down the ramps while the students that were ascending did a 180º and ran for their lives. Strangely, after they were in the clear, they would always flock back around to watch my momentum spin me around and then launch my six-foot body from the three-foot cart once the ground leveled.

I take it back, high school was FUN.

I had told myself when I had started my sophomore year that I wouldn’t be attending college. I never went to college because I didn’t want to be one of those people to continue going through life doing the things they didn’t enjoy and wasting time learning things they wouldn’t apply outside of the 15 square feet that made up the classroom. I refused to waste even two years of my life with college.

I never went to college because I was already sick of the nonsense curriculum in high school, so why would I PAY for it?

I’d rather do the things that interest me. I wanted to grow up to be…

HAPPY!

• Did you go to college? Explain why or why not?

• Do you feel as though the decision you made was the best one?

With the intent to inform, indulge and inspire!