Reliving the Glory Days of College

There’s no doubt about it, the four years I spent at East Stroudsburg State College (Go Warriors!) were among the four best years of my life, filled with many highlights and fond memories.

There’s clearly one highlight that far surpasses the others, and that’s when I met my future wife at a party near the end of my junior year. I’ve already written about what a special night that was, so I thought I’d use this blog to relive some more of my glory days. Since I have so many wonderful memories, I think I’ll spread them over several posts, making a mini-series out of them.

Since this is college we are talking about, it may be best to start with a memory that is academic in nature. I’ve already written about one such memory, and here is another one.

The picture at the top of this post is from a logic test I took second-semester senior year. It was the best course I took in four years at East Stroudsburg, and it’s the only textbook I saved from those four years. That’s right, even my accounting textbook from back then didn’t survive my end of year clean-up.

Here’s the full picture of the test:

The reason for saving the test is that even though I only got a B+ on the test, it had the best comment I had ever received on a test in my 16 years of taking classes. It’s hard to see, but in the bottom right of the photo (which is what the photo at the top of the page highlights), the teacher wrote “ingenious, but remind me say something about”.

The test required me to do some sort of logic proof, and I must have accidentally stumbled upon an unusual way to solve the proof, and the professor seemed impressed by my effort. I vaguely recall him telling me after class that my proof was wrong, but he gave me credit for it anyway because it was “ingenious”.

It’s funny how powerful words can be; that comment gave me the confidence to think that maybe I had a knack for this logic thing, and it motivated me to want to learn the material. As I said, it turned out to be my favorite course in four years of college, and I did ultimately end up with an A for the course.

So thank you, Prof. Allen, for your words of encouragement. They made a difference.

And they remind me that I have the power to return the favor, 40 years later.