Penn State
Penn State
The First Year
As I mentioned before, my senior year in high school was great. But that was only shades of things to come.
While I had the benefit of having an older brother and older sisters to visit, this was really my first time completely on my own-- and my parents were paying for it! How can anyone not think this was the best deal of all?
As soon as I arrived, I got settled in and met a few new friends who I still keep in touch with to this day. Not bad for day 1, huh? By the second week of classes, there were about twelve of us, freshmen and sophomores that did just about everything together-- especially the football games.
Now I had enjoyed football in high school. We had a good team and being in the band meant we went to most of the games whether we wanted to or not. But football at Penn State, as it probably is at any major football university in country, is a completely different deal. The games are great, it seems like everything in the whole world stops while the game is going on and the tailgates and the victory celebrations afterward-- well, let's just say at Penn State, you study hard, work hard and party hard!
In addition to the dorm and football fun, a few of the guys decided to check out what this 'rush' thing was the fraternities were doing. Seemed like another good excuse to not study on Friday nights so we hit about ten of the fifty fraternities on campus and generally had a good time. None of us were really 'into' this Greek thing, but we met some nice guys and had a few laughs. After a few parties, we were invited to various houses to have dinner. This was great, because while Penn State has some of the best institutional food in the country-- it is still institutional food, if you know what I mean. What we didn't know was that the dinners were a prelude to being asked to join or 'bid'. We each got a couple of offers and after talking to my Dad, I actually considered accepting one. However, I just was having too much fun in the dorms to change in mid-year so I politely declined as did all my new friends.
Life was good and after a typically depressing Winter quarter, we all road tripped down to Florida and visited my sister and her family as well as some other relatives of the group. It was a great trip and included a stop at Fort Lauderdale and Disney World. However, all was not roses as our 'theme song' attested to. It was "Getting to Know You, Getting to Know TOO MUCH About You...". After a long trip back and totalling only one of the cars (yes, we all survived), things got back to normal in State College.
As you might have guessed, by some of the other references on my pages, I did rush again in the Spring and found the perfect match. Kappa Sigma took a while to realize it (I was one of the last guys to get a bid) but after all that we agreed that my joining would do us both a lot of good.
So, at the end of the year all my dorm friends were surprised by my pledging Kappa Sigma, but we all swore we'd keep in touch and they would come by to visit me in the Fall. Not a bad start, I'd say.
The Second Year
As you might imagine, the second year started off big. Pledging started the week before classes and my life was Kappa Sigma's for the next eight weeks. You can check out my
Home Chapter
page for more information on that.
It was still football season and I still had a lot of connections outside the fraternity, so I continued with University Choirs, which I had joined when I got to campus and my Psyche classes were finally getting more interesting and I was more and more convinced that I would be a Clinical Psychologist in six or seven years.
Winter was cold and wet but being a newly initiated brother and having rush and all the other activities of the fraternity to tend with made it fly by.
Spring brought out the sun-worshipers and the long term to summer just cruised along with weekends of trips to Virginia, parties at the house, Gentle Thursday (the last remnant of the '60s), and my last concert with the University Choirs with Andre Previn conducting.
Summer was coming and it would be great. Painting houses with my best friend at home and a trip to my first fraternity conclave and my brother John in Phoenix in August.
The Third Year
As you might imagine, Phoenix was hot (but it was a dry heat), and the fire was lit in my belly for Kappa Sig.
I came back to school ready to lead the chapter and was elected to office.
School was going along fine and I found I could get everything done still have fun-- football, fraternity, friends, what a great time.
School ended with my having a job working on the Jersey Shore for the summer. I was going to be in charge (literally 'chief cook and bottle washer') for a bar snack bar. What an experience that turned out to be...
The Fourth Year
Returning for my fourth, and, due to my own stupid planning, last year at Penn State, was a bittersweet event. Many lasts would be marked this year. And the summer had been quite an education with a lot of work, a fair bit of money saved and still some of the hardiest partying of my life to date! I knew that the party was ending and I'd have to get on with my life in nine short months.
Fortunately, it was a very busy year. The first thing was that Penn State had a great season. '82 would be better, but I wouldn't be there :-( The fraternity was still busy but everything I did I knew I was doing 'for the last time'. School got more interesting and it was time to start thinking about grad school.
Well, I got my resume in order and started looking for some references. Many of my professors were more than willing to give me good recommendations. Unfortunately, they couldn't avoid telling me that Psyche Grad Schools were more competitive than Med Schools! Needless to say, this was quite a shock to a solid 'B' student in his last year of school. I took the GREs and sent off the applications, anyway. As expected, no one was interested in a 'B' student, at least no one I asked. As one prof told me 'Of course you can get into grad school, but would you want to go to a school that would accept you?' He was right and I started thinking (not very hard) about what was to come next.
My saving grace was that I still had to finish school so I kept taking classes. Finally, in my last term, I took my last math requirement-- CompSci. I loved it. It was 'obvious' to me. I enjoyed it and easily aced it. Now, how do you tell your parents, the ones that have paid for four years of school and told you when you graduated from high school that computers were the thing to get into that you wanted to change your major (finally)? The answer is, you don't!
So, I came up with a better answer based on advice from some of my psyche friends. 'Check out MIS', they said. 'It's a new field of study combining psyche and computers.' So, I sent off an application; got accepted; was told I was going (thanks Joan and Dad) and was off to
Arizona
...