Going Back
circa 2002–2003
In my early twenties I floundered. No vision. No prospects. No plan beyond the next paycheck. I was working, I was alive, I had two kids, but I couldn’t see a future that looked any different from the present. I was stuck in the way where you don’t realize you’re stuck because you’ve never been anywhere else.
At some point I looked into an online for-profit school. A sales person on the phone almost convinced me — graphic design, work remotely, take out a bunch of loans, easy. She was good at her job. I came within a signature of doing it. I didn’t, and I’m glad, because that loan would have followed me for decades and the degree would have been worth nothing. But the phone call did something useful: it made me realize I needed to make a change. The hunger was there. I just needed to point it somewhere real.
UWGB seemed impossible. I’d been there before and washed out — D’s in math, no direction, the kind of transcript that says “this person gave up.” I didn’t know if it was low self-esteem or just a realistic assessment of my odds. Probably both. But I convinced them to take me back on the condition that I retake the courses I’d failed. Including a five-credit chemistry class that was genuinely hard.
I took one class the first semester. Then two the next. All of it around a full-time work schedule — I was still at the paper, still at Barnsite, still driving back and forth from Algoma. It was a proof of concept, and the proof was immediate. I got straight A’s. Every class. I was in my world again — around learners, around professors, around people who cared about ideas. I made friends with all of them. As a non-traditional student in my late twenties, I was older than most of my classmates and younger than most of my professors, and I fit in with both. The age gap didn’t matter. The curiosity did.
I retook Algebra and got an A. The professor turned out to be a friend of my Grandpa Donald Krumpos — they’d worked together at the post office in De Pere. Small world. Smaller state. Then Anthropology, another A. My paper on the process of death got a good review. Each class was another piece of evidence that I wasn’t the person my old transcript said I was.
That was enough. I decided to go back full time.