As we left our little palace of a home at Delmas number 65 in poor little Haiti, I thought of how ironic it was that although we were going back to the rich US, we would be returning to our little apartment in the projects. Here in Haiti, we had been living in the virtual lap of luxury in our own large home complete with a maid and a watchman, while on Staten Island, we had no house to call our very own. Mom and Dad later told us that our trip to Haiti, when they had to bring us back to that little apartment in the projects, brought on a new sense of urgency in them to buy a house. Although they had been saving for many years towards that goal, they kicked their plans into high gear as soon as we returned home late in the summer of 1989, and by February 1990, our family’s dream and the dream of many immigrant families had finally come true: we owned our own home. It was located on a quiet tree-lined street on Staten Island, the house number... 65.
“College” and flying magazine
Spring 1990 brought with it my 17th birthday in April and the realization that I would be starting my senior year of high school in the fall. In a year and half, I would be starting college, where I would finally start learning to fly. I was still a regular visitor to my school library’s research section, where I tried to learn all I could about collegiate flying programs and about the lives of airline pilots. My school guidance counselor, with whom I had been meeting periodically since starting high school, was doing her best to help guide me along the path to finding schools where I could get my Bachelor’s degree while also getting my FAA pilot licenses. I did well on the PSAT that spring, and as I started my senior year in September, prepared for the real deal, the SAT, which I was planning to take it in November.
Most of the students in the Scholar’s Academy had much more conventional career goals, planning to enter fields such as medicine, law, business, and the like. I was the only one in the Academy and to my knowledge, my whole graduating class of nearly five hundred, who wanted to go to college to learn to fly. In those pre-internet days, the main sources of information regarding colleges were, unbelievably... books! My guidance counselor and I poured through reference guides like Peterson’s College Guide and the US News and World Report College Guide looking for information about where I could get a Bachelor’s degree in aviation while learning to fly. Whenever one of my classmates went to the guidance counselor looking for advice on colleges to apply to, she had dozens of suggestions for them. For me, she had a grand total of one. It was a school called Dowling College in Long Island, New York. I appreciated her help, but I soon realized that I would be on my own in finding a school that fit my career goals and met my idea of “college”.
Over the years, the word “college” had come to mean a place with history and cobblestone streets, walkways with little lampposts, brick buildings with ivy on the walls, football games, basketball games, parties, and many hot girls. My idea of college had been shaped by dozens of movies about college life I had seen over the years, such as Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds and television shows, such as A Different World, as well as by my own research into historic colleges and universities around the country. I wanted a picture-perfect postcard campus, a great academic, and aviation program, along all with all the fun that those movies and television shows had primed me to expect in college. I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop looking until I found it, even if that meant I had to transfer colleges. A senior year class trip to the University of Pennsylvania campus only served to cement the idea about the kind of college experience I was looking for. It was my first time visiting such a large campus that stretched for blocks and blocks with seemingly hundreds of buildings. The College of Staten Island campus, with which I had become familiar while my mom was attending, seemed like nothing more than an overgrown high school by comparison.
In addition to the previously mentioned requirements, I was also looking for an aviation program that didn’t require me to take any in-depth calculus or physics. Over my years of high school, as the math had grown increasingly difficult, I often found myself wondering what the point of learning all of it was. I did not want to be a math teacher, and I did not want to be an Aeronautical Engineer. I enjoyed reading and writing and could whip out an essay or a book report with no problem with the results usually being A’s, while I had to study long hours and fight for Bs and Cs in trigonometry, calculus, and physics, and that was only on the high school level. I knew that a basic knowledge of physics was required to understand the physics of flight. But I also knew that learning to fly an airplane was much more hands-on and practical, as opposed to theoretical. However, as often happens in life, the things we fear the most often place themselves squarely in our path for us to overcome. I was unwittingly setting myself up for a collision course with those two dreaded subjects, and they would be the final two obstacles standing in the way of me finally earning my Bachelor’s degree and moving on with my career plans.
Another very important criterion for my college was that it be away from home. I loved my family dearly, but my wanderlust and desire to explore would not allow me to go to a college near home. I wanted to go away to college and to live in a dorm. My guidance counselor’s suggestion of Dowling College certainly did not meet that requirement, as it was in nearby Long Island. Simply put, I didn’t want to go to a school where Mom and Dad could drop by unexpectedly or where I could go running home every weekend. I wanted a residential campus, and I wanted to be on my own, with all the freedom and all the responsibility that came with it.
I took my SAT that autumn and got a score of one thousand out of sixteen hundred, which, coupled with my B+ average in my high school classes, opened up quite a few options for me as far as schools that would accept me. I had become an avid reader of Flying magazine and became familiar with a couple of universities that always advertised in its pages; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida and Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) in Melbourne, Florida. With a dearth of college choices, I applied to both of those schools early in 1991, and both accepted me that spring. I ended up choosing FIT, in part because unlike Embry-Riddle, it had a wider variety of students. I wanted also to be exposed to people who were studying things besides aviation.
When I got the acceptance letter from FIT, I excitedly went to Mom and Dad to tell them the good news, and they beamed with pride. The initial enthusiasm I had felt at the prospect of going to college quickly gave way to the sobering reality of just how incredibly expensive it was going to be when the first bill from FIT arrived in the mail. Learning to fly while getting my degree was almost as expensive as law school or medical school. With five kids and a shiny new house with a shiny new mortgage, my parents were faced with the daunting prospect of finding a way to help fund this dream of mine, and I knew that my college expenses would be a big strain on our family’s finances in the ensuing years. With that first bill in hand, my parents and I convened at the kitchen table and started to put our heads together to find a way to pay for all this. We had a number of ideas on how to go about it but we realized that it was not going to be easy. I, however, thought I had the perfect plan.
My last chance for love
It was Spring of my senior year, and Jennifer (the girl I had been secretly in love with for four years) and I had become very close friends. However, she seemed oblivious to my true feelings for her. Whenever she smiled or talked to me, I was totally lost in the moment. I wanted so desperately to tell her how I felt but since I dreaded the thought of rejection, I had continued to settle for just her friendship. But as the saying goes “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Faced with the impending end of high school and with Jennifer going to a different university than me, I finally decided that I would tell her how I had felt all these years. As fate would have it, Miss. Kirsch assigned Jennifer and me to a special project, which meant I would finally be spending time alone with her. The few weeks that the project lasted were some of the best memories I have of high school. Jennifer and I talked, joked, and got to know each other more than ever before. You would think that I could have mustered up the courage just to let it out, and I tried on more than one occasion, but the sound of my heart beating in my ears from fear always stopped me. Then it came to me; I had always been able to express myself on paper, so I decided to write her a love letter.
I sat down that night with pen and paper and started to pour out all the feelings for her that I had held inside onto that page. I told her how beautiful