Part 2: How'd I get here?

Don't get me wrong: college rounded out my experience like no where else could, and in such a short amount of time, too. Professors mean well; but they test you according to their agenda--their interests. The reality is that the experience as a whole had many other advantages outside of any one class, but that just didn't really show up in my final overall grade. Or did it?

I worked 20 hours a week as custodial throughout my college years. There are some great people working hard to put themselves through school on top of working hard in school. I took pride in keeping up what could be claimed the cleanest campus in the world. I participated in the Juggling Club. There were many entertaining opportunities to be involved in, and to explore and observe in a university of talents. I also volunteered my service as a project leader, organizing people to help in maybe the most multi-lingual language facilities, the Missionary Training Center, a place technically part of the BYU campus. I loved and attended devotionals and family home evening and other unique programs that were part of the BYU experience. My biggest development of writing (my main skill), however, also came through a side project more than class experience. I was able to take a couple classes where writing a novel applied, certainly, but it was mostly an outside endeavor that progressed it. I even had a professor, acting as my agent, and with his help and mine, and others, writing we were wooing national publishers. Writing a novel while attending college, required staying up one night every week though, for two semesters. Still I felt I needed to give it a try given the possibilities of opportunities that had befallen me; it was also best sooner than later, to know whether that could be a viable direction or not.

The novel turned out okay and had a lot of promise according to the publishers. It was an historical fiction novel. Unfortunately, to appease publishers, fictionalization needed in tying together events, was too sensationalized for the man whose deceased father the story surrounded. He liked the early direction of the book. Taking notes from his accounts was like writing a biographical documentary. If his father's story ever gets published it will need to have life breathed into it that accounts for some dramatic events that actually occurred, and probably occurred in a more humanistic way then he let on. His words to me upon seeing the final product were, "if this gets published, I divorce myself from the project entirely." On ethics, knowing it isn't his generations' way to sue me or anything, I still dropped the work. There is no way I could satisfy both the researcher and the publishers, but I wanted to. They were at two ends of a spectrum and I was in between.

My grades suffered. I graduated one class short of a business minor. And English majors need a minor to prove they know some expertise to write about. Nine months looking for a position, interviewing with all the premier positions (and otherwise), in the small Marketing world of Utah, left me with lots of good advice, but jobless nonetheless. I needed work, and soon, my savings dwindled and my rent was up. I packed up my car with all of my belongings and moved to Salt Lake to live with a cousin. Not wanting to overstay my visit I found the only job in the Marketing field I could find (aka construction work as a member of the billboard rotary crew). And that's how I got here, stuck on billboards for a time until I could levy my skills elsewhere. More experience would come!