Brian Goes To College

Read­ing was a part of grow­ing up for me. This included weekly trips to the library where my mom would pick out books to read to us and when we got older, we would pick out books for us to read on our own. Some where around age eleven, much to my mom’s cha­grin, I decided to read my way through the entire sci­ence fic­tion sec­tion, start­ing from the let­ter A. The limit on check­ing out books was 6 and I would always take the max­i­mum home. Over the next few years I made a big dent in the alphabet.

When the Star Trek TV series first came out, I just had to see it. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t come on until 9 p.m., which was past my bed­time. In the sum­mers though, for re-runs, I was allowed to stay up late to watch it. After two sea­sons it was gone from TV, but not out of my memory.

Right out of high school I joined the Navy. My fam­ily didn’t have the money to just send me to col­lege and being nei­ther superb jock nor aca­d­e­mic genius, col­leges were not beat­ing a path to my door with schol­ar­ships. I chose the Navy over the branches of the ser­vice for some very com­pelling rea­sons; some friends of mine were join­ing, my Dad was on a destroyer dur­ing the Korean war and most impor­tantly sailors got to wear those cool bell-bottomed uni­forms. Or just maybe, it was because of all the nau­ti­cal type ref­er­ences in Star Trek.

My plan was after see­ing the world, I would get out of the Navy and go to col­lege using the GI Bill. Not because I had a spe­cific career path in mind that required a degree, but because I wanted to be able to put one of those col­lege stick­ers that read “So-and-so Uni­ver­sity” in the back win­dow of my car.

True to my dream, after get­ting out of the ser­vice I started my higher edu­ca­tion at a local com­mu­nity col­lege. My inten­tions were to start there and work my way up to a real uni­ver­sity. In the first semes­ter, I took Draft­ing 101, a require­ment for any­one work­ing towards an engi­neer­ing degree. The thought being, I guess, is that if you could cre­ate an engi­neer­ing draw­ing, you could under­stand one.

After only a cou­ple of weeks of this course I real­ized that I had found out what I wanted to be when I grew up, a drafts­man not an engi­neer. I grad­u­ated in two years with an Asso­ciates Degree in Engi­neer­ing Graph­ics Tech­nol­ogy. Del­gado Com­mu­nity Col­lege just didn’t have the same impact as Clem­son or Geor­gia Tech, so I never bought the win­dow sticker.

Even before I got my Miata, while wait­ing those 108 days, I decided to buy my first acces­sory, the col­lege sticker. Now I couldn’t just go buy one that said, say, Penn State or Notre Dame, never hav­ing attended either place, not even through a cor­re­spon­dence course. There was just one school’s sticker that my con­science would let me place on my car. An insti­tute of higher learn­ing that was to be built in San Fran­cisco a cou­ple of cen­turies down the road. The place that all future star­ship offi­cers, James T. Kirk included, would attend, Starfleet Academy.

Being one of the first few Miatas in Aiken meant a lot more atten­tion than I had bar­gained for. Side­long glances at stop­lights, stares from peo­ple at the next gas pump, down­right eerie. Folks were always ask­ing what kind of car was it, how much was it, how fast will it go, what kind gas mileage did it get, etc. I usu­ally took it all in stride. One Sun­day I had to go to the store for some­thing, what­ever. This was a chilly day, so the top was up, after park­ing the car and start­ing towards Food Lion, a young man comes run­ning up to me all excited and asks, “Where did you get it!?!” I told him that I got it at Rader in Augusta. When I started to explain about the deposit and the three month wait, he got a real puz­zled look on his face. That’s when he said, “No, not the car, the Starfleet Acad­emy sticker.”