Okay, I lied.

We are coming up on a year from when I decided that I was going to drop out of college. For those who don’t know I was attending Purdue University. I was studying Marketing in the Krannert School of Business. I had finished two years of schooling. Well, I had been at Purdue for two years. We will stick with that.

In March of 2016, only a couple days before spring break, I was asked to leave the Purdue Track and Field team. Immediately after getting out of that meeting with my former coaches, I called my dad and told him the good news. The phone rang a few times and then my dad picked up, “Hello?” Without even asking how he was doing I said, “It happened, they kicked me off the team. What should I do next?”

In December of 2015 I had started getting into what turned out to be a passion of mine, coding. At the time that meant simple ‘a href’ and ‘img’ tags, but in March I was presented with an opportunity that would lead me to stop wasting money and start learning. Don’t get me wrong, college works for a lot of people, but it wasn’t for me. I skipped classes, didn’t do homework, got really good at video games, and did a little bit of coding on the side. This all changed in March.

The day started off pretty normal, I woke up around 9 or 10 (having skipped my first class). I put on my slippers (thanks Allie), and I made my way up to my computer/Xbox 1 grabbing a pop tart on the way. Knowing that my next class was at 10:30, I turned on my Xbox. We, being the long distance guys, had a workout on the track that night so I knew that I had a solid 4–5 hours of gameplay ahead of me. Lunch came and passed. I didn’t eat anything most days, and if I did it was a toaster strudel. Great diet, right?

The workout started off pretty strong and then about 3/4 the way through I started to fade. I was getting tired. Probably because I failed to get the sleep and nutrition that I needed. I continued on with the workout and on the last rep I ran as fast as I could. This was a tradition of mine. No matter how bad I was hurting I always finished the workout as fast as I could.

Coach didn’t like that so he called me over, and yelled at me. What he said doesn’t matter now but I hope he deals with his current athletes differently. We had a team meeting and afterwards he told me that he and the head coach wanted to talk to me up in the office. I walked straight to the office and waited.

The meeting started and my ears turned off. You get used to doing that when someone says things as negative as these guys did. I was waiting for two words. “Kicked off.” They didn’t say it exactly like that but it was close enough that I knew when I was allowed to leave. They gave me the option of staying on the team for the remainder of the year to get a good enough steeplechase time to transfer to a different school, but I couldn’t have cared less. After they stopped berating me I said, “Thank you for your time,” and I walked out.

Now, we are on the phone call with my dad. I told him that I was going to take some time to pray about what I should do next and get back to him. I already had my mind made up. I was going to move back to Indianapolis. So I started to line it up. I asked my grandmother if I could move in until I found an apartment. I got an internship writing code. I had it all figured out.

The one question (the one that I lied about) was, “Are you going to go back to college?” I didn’t want to but I had this feeling that it was the way to go. I then started doing some research, watched some videos on the internet, and taught myself how to write code. I started to find that I really liked this.

I had told everyone I knew that I was going to go back to school in a year and here we are February of 2017 and I haven’t even thought about applying. There is a lot to say about the education a university can present a young person, but let’s look at the facts. The college drop outs that really attack the marketplace actually lead to something really big. I’m not saying that you can’t do that with a degree but why wait?

Am I going back to college? Never.

Am I done learning? Never.

This is just the start to a great story.