1960
I couldn't go to any college that was going to charge tuition, and no one in my family had ever gone to college. I wanted to go to CCNY because I knew of its reputation for excellence in terms of the alumni who had graduated. I was the first generation in my family to graduate from college. It was huge, but it was always an expectation that I would go to college. My dad left school in the eighth grade to go to work and my mom had graduated high school in Manhattan. My parents could not afford a college. My dad was a taxi cab driver and my mother was a homemaker and she earned no income. We lived day-to-day on what my father brought home from work. There was no money to go to college, but CCNY was there for me when I needed it most. When I graduated, I went to become a historian and I got a partial scholarship at Northwestern University in Chicago. I found out while I was in the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, that I had won the New York State Regions Teaching Fellowship. It would have paid for all of graduate school, but it required that I go to a graduate school in New York. I was able to apply the analytics skills I had with the kind of training I received. It was truly remarkable.