Continued from Part 7
So at the ripe and enlightened age of 17 I was expected to pick the course of the rest of my life. Settling on computer science, I began applying to school and really wanted to get into the Rochester Institute of Technology. I applied to a few other schools but this was my dream school. Anxiously I awaited and eventually received my acceptance letter. I was thrilled! My father reviewed the documents and was concerned about the cost. We took a trip to the school and spoke with the financial aide department. Essentially there wasn’t anything they would be able to do about the cost and would need to take out loans for it. When we got back, home my dad essentially told me there was no way I was going to this school and needed to spend two years at community college. I was heartbroken.
I came to call this thirteenth grade. There were a lot of people I went to high school with that went here. I became resentful and didn’t put much effort into school. Instead I spent that time working on trying to become a leader in the church. I started a bible study at the college. I made sure to reserve the room that had the big windows so people could see us in there and might stop and ask about it. Didn’t get a whole lot of response to that. It ended up just being a bible study for the people that went to my church and school. This was also about the same time that I started taking classes at church. They weren’t formal learning but more of a getting to know yourself type thing. I’m realizing now how ineffective it is. Part of it was taking a Myers-Briggs test. When I first took it I was an ENFJ. I took it again a few years ago it had changed drastically to INTJ. After leaving the church I found how unreliable these tests actually are.
Part of my college curriculum required us to take the philosophy of logic. It basically teaches logic gates and how to calculate true/false statements. I found a lot of these portions very interesting and lead me to take a few other philosophy classes, ethics and metaphysics. Ethics was a pretty great class. It got me thinking about how we arrive at what we deem right and wrong. However, I essentially just used it to fill in the gaps of things not directly stated in the bible. Metaphysics was a bit more eye opening. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality. Things like how do we know we’re not just a brain in a vat being fed memories and sensory inputs. I liked to entertain these types of thought experiments but didn’t put much actual stock into it.