Georgetown University Gate, Healy Building. November 2021
“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” —K.L. Toth
On becoming (and luck)
The last years of high school were not kind to me. I was depressed far more than the usual teenager. My favorite subject in high school was French and my favorite thing was to go anywhere new since I felt trapped in a very small world. At some point, I made my peace with it all. Life was going to change and I was the only one who was going to change it. I was automatically accepted to Penn State Main Campus due to my high school grades, but that was my "extreme fall back position". I wanted OUT.
A passing comment from a high school French teacher, Carol deRibert, when I was applying to universities had me apply to Georgetown (she said, "I heard Georgetown has a good language program"). So naive and sheltered was I that I had no idea of its reputation and the difficulty of acceptance. I applied only knowing it had a "good language program". Had my younger self known of the struggle of some academically high-achieving students from private high schools to get into the place, I might not have even applied. Ignorance can be helpful on occasion.
I was invited for an interview on campus and a prospective freshmen weekend. My brother and his first wife begrudgingly drove me to Washington. I recall how excited I was on the trip there. When we were on the George Washington Parkway near the Key Bridge exit, I looked across the Potomac and saw the university on the other side. I quipped to them "wouldn't that be great if that were the university?" It actually was! Much of that trip has receded into the dark corners of my brain. We slept in freshmen dorms in the rooms of "real students" to get the "college experience". There were classes to observe and interviews. I did meet my first, later-to-be GU friend there, Maureen Connolly, from Rhode Island. We kept in touch after the event and I even travelled to her place that summer to meet her. She introduced me to Newport, another of my favorite places.
I applied at the right time. Georgetown was trying to move away from its "prep school elite only" source of students and dig deep into "Amerka" to diversify. No one from Eastern York High School in Pennsylvania had ever applied and I had decent marks. I was a "shoe in" as it were. Additionally, I was NOT applying for a coveted, pre-med seat in the College of Arts and Sciences, and I was only applying to the School of Languages and Linguistics (SLL) aka "ling lang". I got accepted.
Georgetown was shock upon shock. Most of the students had gone to urban/suburban, wealthy public high schools or private prep schools and had a much better educational background than me. For them, a lot of the first year was "review-ish". For me - it was a lot of frenzied catching up. I had taken French for SIX years of junior and senior high school, sat for a placement exam upon arrival at GU, and was definitively placed in Intensive Introduction to French (I was a French major initially). I felt extremely deflated. On top of that, I met "third culture kids" who already knew several languages and acted like "oh, doesn't everyone?" Even though I wanted to make it all work, I quickly realized I was not going to succeed or thrive as a French major. How was I going to compete with "oh I speak French because we summered in Saint Tropez every year"?
HOWEVER, when a door closes, a window opens. Everyone had to take two semesters of "Introduction to Language" (i.e., Linguistics) as an SLL student and I soon realized I LOVED that class (which was roundly despised by almost everyone else}. I understood that I did love French, but I actually loved learning ABOUT languages more than focusing on just one. I switched majors in my second semester without abandoning French (one still had to take a language as a Linguistics major). It seemed the best of both worlds. I was also lucky to have a super-energetic TA as my Intro to Language teacher, Lou Ann Daly, who did her best to make an unpopular subject "fun" for the class.
I initially worked in the cafeteria as my on-campus job, but I didn't see how slopping food was going to help me get ahead. I saw a position in the "Language Processing Center" and I switched to a small research center inside the Department of Computational Linguistics. I can't say I loved the job (a lot of data entry), but I did leapfrog ahead of most of my peers in general computer skills. Let's recall in the early 1980s very few people knew how to use a computer, period. It was an extreme stroke of luck for me even if I didn't particularly like the job (nor my boss, Len Schafer). Again, dumb luck really seemed to help me along.
From a teenage funk, to a random comment by a high school teacher, to applying to a university that was probably way out of my league, to realizing I actually could NOT speak French, to falling in love with Linguistics, to being an early computer nerd - my life changed dramatically in a year. I DID become the version of Matt that Matt wanted. Toth was absolutely right!