Mapping Out Your Future With Mike


Princeton University - Wake Up Call.

From my first memories of elementary school to the end of high school, my memories are filled with academic awards and a feeling of accomplishment. Unfortunately the accomplishment was usually with a minimum of effort. In actuality, I breezed through to the end of high school with top grades.

In the fall of 1966, I entered the class of 1970 at Princeton University. My department was Chemical Engineering. For the first time in my life, I was not one of the top students in my class. Talk about big frog - little pond syndrome.

A shift in priorities from hockey to social activities, together with university life, resulted in mediocre results during my freshman year. A group of 8 of us arranged for a common rooms as sophmores and the stage was set. As a sophmore, Princeton starts to ramp up course content and I found that I could not slide by on a minimal effort. I ended up on academic probation after first semester. Football parties and a healthy social life had some effect as well. The parents exploded and I was told to deliver or else, so for the first half of second semester sophmore I went to class, I studied, I was a conscientious student. My mid term grades were outstanding, basically 1.0, which is straight A's. Chem Eng was a breeze so I stopped going to class and started the full time partying. I knew I was in some trouble when I went home for the summer break. I had never failed a single course.

Princeton decided that it would be better if I withdrew and took 18 months to reconsider my committment to university life and scholastics. The professors reassessed my grades to reflect my sophmoric attitude and actually had dropped one class to a failure, a well deserved failure. Talk about a slap in the face. I had a summer job already at Ontario Paper so I went to work and thought about my future.

I met my wife DJ that fall and we got married on November 28, 1968. No real job, broke, no degree and no future, what a recipe for disaster. DJ woke me up and I applied to return to Princeton in the spring of 1970 as a second semester sophmore. I got a good job at Stelco and we survived somehow.

When I returned to Princeton, there was no parental financial support. The original University support was gone as I had disappointed everyone including myself with regard to both hockey and scholastics. Some very gracious alumni provided the finances so that I could complete my degree at Princeton. I worked full time as a bartender during the night; studied chemical engineering during the day. I do not recommend that level of business to anyone. Somehow we survived and I graduated with the class of 1972.

No one gets a free pass.
Don't kid yourself, no one.