What ultimately saved me was a man, who happened to be a college admissions officer, who saw me as a person — not as a string of bad transcripts and unchecked boxes, but as a complex person with little opportunity, much bad luck, and a series of regrettable decisions, but who might still manage to get by in life.
Three months after I dropped out, I was kicked out of my parents' house. For the next three years, I worked more low-paying jobs in restaurants, factories, ice cream places, burger joints, and gas stations. I went door-to-door selling chef's knives and pots, magazine subscriptions, and makeup. Not old enough or stable enough to get a lease, I lived in my beat-up car, living on co-workers' couches, friends' floors, and occasionally parking lots.
I started booking local rock bands, and through that work I met a producer/engineer friend who taught me about contracts, ancillary fees, percentages vs. flat fees, marketing and promotion. Then one day, when I was 19, he said to me with indescribable kindness, “You have to go to college. Do you want to be a loser your whole life?”
I was clearly not a college candidate. Unlike the kids who were changing the world vying for a handful of spots at top universities, I had no choice. My only hope was that someone would listen to me and give me a chance. It was a small school called Northcentral University, in the far west suburbs of Chicago. Rick Spencer, the admissions director, sat me down in his office and listened to my story. I had no letters of recommendation, no SAT or ACT scores, no sports, no extracurricular activities. What I did have, and what he asked me to talk about, was drive. A sense that the bleakness of my life for the last three years would continue forever unless I did something very different.
Northcentral gave me a life that would see me go on to graduate school, travel the world as a foreign correspondent, give birth to a daughter, publish multiple books, and ultimately become a professor — none of these accomplishments would have been possible without the man who took a chance on me.