College basketball was one of the hardest, most rewarding experiences of my life. Every single day on the court was a mental and physical challenge.
Humans are such creatures of habit that once they get us in all this debt that we accumulate from going college that we have to work it off for the rest of our lives.
I think the desire to be a journalist started post-911. I'm Syrian American. I speak fluent Arabic. I'd come back to the States for college. I went to Skidmore in upstate New York. I was coming from Turkey, and I'd noticed that I could talk about concepts and ideas and people who seemed foreign to Americans, and they were interested in what I had to say. I think some of it is maybe because I'm very unassuming and I look American, but I'm very much from there as well so I can speak with authority about all of these issues.
One of the wonderful things about going to a small college is you can get into everything.
I went to college to play football, not to study it.
Within ten years, he had earned his college degree and was a millionaire from his business enterprises in real estate, landscaping, and bodybuilding. He was also the winner of a Golden Globe Award for his debut as a dramatic actor in Stay Hungry.
State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes.
The cost of college should never discourage anyone from going after a valuable degree.
We all have a role to play - the President, Congress, parents, students and schools - in making college affordable and keeping the middle class dream alive.
Far too many of our children today, our students, need remedial education. We have been lying to them. They're not really ready for college. That's not higher education's fault. That's our fault K-12.
When schools truly become centers of the community, where you have extraordinary teachers, the best teachers, the best principals, great nonprofit partners coming in during the non-school hours to support and do enrichment activities, social services, then those students will beat the odds, will beat poverty, will beat violence in the community, will beat sometimes dysfunctional families, and be productive citizens long term. They will go to college.
The more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, 'Sure, why not?
I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'
Hillary Clinton began a New York thank-you tour Friday by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. No wonder Arkansas never liked her. She hasn't been in office three days and already she's an abolitionist.
I'm a drummer. I've been playing since I was three. I was in college bands when I was in elementary school: you'd see all these older kids and then this little kid behind the drums creating this big sound.
I knew that I wanted to pursue acting as a profession during my sophomore year of college. One of my Professors (Karen Deacons-Brock) at N.C Central University assigned me to perform a one woman show for my final project and it was then, along with her encouragement, that it was time for me to move to NY in pursuit of a professional acting career.
I don't know if I'd ever want to show my college life in the films I make. I think I've passed that stage long ago.
I was about 17 or 18 when I first started performing in public. I had a teacher when I was a freshman in college and she came up to me afterwards and said she had been crying while I had been singing, and it really shocked me.
When I was a junior in college I moved to New York and went to this performance school the Experimental Theatre Wing. We had singing class and again, some of the other students would cry when I was singing, and I really didn't know why. I started to realize that there was something in the tone of my voice that was evocative for them.
If I had stayed with football in college, I probably would have been a first-round pick.
In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.
If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything.
While I was in college, I became a page at ABC. Suddenly I was working for Good Morning America, local news, national news. The page is the lowest rung of the ladder, and it's the also the place where you can ask any question and not feel dumb.
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.
