It came time for me to decide where to go to college and, frankly, there were not a lot of choices. As I have mentioned before, my family did not have a lot of money. Had I not had a scholarship to Prep, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go there at all.

    Going out of state was pretty much a non-starter, we just couldn’t afford it. I had pretty good SAT scores, but not the kind that would get me scholarships into places like MIT or Stanford or other top-notch colleges. As luck would have it, I was offered a scholarship, this time to a pretty good engineering school, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, emphasis on the last word, BROOKLYN. I obviously accepted it, and so I wound up spending another four years traveling underground in the NYC subway system, as I did at Prep.

    Note: I don’t know if I am the “Kiss of Death,” but both schools I attended are now no longer in existence. Brooklyn Preparatory closed down and became Medgar Evers College Preparatory School, and Brooklyn Polytechnic is now a part of NYU and is called New York University Tandon School of Engineering. They both still count as forks, though.