In my third year at Brooklyn Preparatory High School, we were given a choice. You could opt for either a Humanities/Liberal Arts curriculum, or a Math/Science curriculum. If you chose the former, you would start taking Greek and, if you chose the latter, you would have more math and science-related classes.

    It was around this time that we were shooting people into orbit around the Earth and I was taken up by this, so it should come as no surprise which fork I chose. Plus, I took a look at the Greek character set, which you obviously had to master, as well as having to learn another language. That made my decision a lot easier. I am not a fan of ambiguity and I have a saying I have repeated many times in my life, “2 plus 2 equals 4, there is no doubt about it.”

    Being a Jesuit high school, I continued in Latin and English, but for the next two years, I spent a lot of my time concentrating on Math and Science. As I mentioned previously, I was in the Advanced Honors class for all four years, and during my last year at Prep, I took college-level courses in Math, which provided an excellent foundation.

    In my first semester at college, I took a Math class that was practically the same as the one I took in my last semester at Prep. As a result, I wound up getting a far better understanding of it and carried that knowledge on through my entire time in college. A pretty significant fork if you ask me.