What School Didn’t Teach Us: How to Succeed

Welcome back to our summer series, “What School Didn’t Teach Us,” where six writers—one for each day this week (except Sunday, that’s Douglas’s day)—share the lessons they’ve learned outside of formal education. Yesterday, Larissa Phillips wrote that learning to ride horses as an adult is terrifying—but overcoming terror becomes kind of addictive. Today, our deputy managing editor, Joe Nocera, admits that he learned “absolutely nothing” in college. Read on to find out how he managed to succeed anyway.

It has occurred to me recently that during the years I spent in college five decades ago—yes, fifty long years ago—I learned absolutely nothing. I took out loans and worked two jobs during summer to pay the tuition, yet if I learned anything between the ages of 18 and 21, it was outside the classroom. For this, I have no one to blame but myself; as you shall see, I made some unfortunate choices. That it worked out fine anyway, well, that’s what this essay is about.

I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, the oldest of nine children. My devoutly Catholic parents were public school teachers, so while we were middle class, there was never an abundance of money. When it came time to choose a college, I applied to Boston University, mainly because it was the only campus outside of Providence that I’d ever seen. (Until I was a junior in college, I had never traveled further than 50 miles to Boston, where my mother would sometimes take me to have my asthma treated at a clinic on Commonwealth Avenue, which happened to also be the home of BU.)

At my mother’s urging, I also applied to Harvard, but I knew I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in. When BU not only offered me a place but threw in a little financial aid, I said yes.

Was this the first of my unfortunate decisions? I’m sorry to say, dear alma mater, it was.