When I was in college, especially in my last two years, I spent just about every day at the Student Union playing bridge; I had classes in the morning and that would be it. I really didn’t work that hard at college. I got passing grades and that was all that mattered. I didn’t have to be at the top of my class. When I got out of the Army and went to graduate school, I really worked at school. I think the two years in the Army helped me learn some discipline.
Jo Anne had to complete a semester on the Hilltop Campus to get into OT school, and she spent the next two years at the Medical School. Jo Anne’s cousin Jeep Kuhn had married Marianne Millstone, so I managed to get a job at Millstone Construction. I worked for Millstone during the summer and into the fall because the MBA program was changing. They were going to start a five-day-a-week program, and it just so happened it would be five mornings a week in that fall semester. I had taken a number of required courses anyway and I was going to join that group for the spring semester to finish up. I also took some night courses.
I continued to work for Millstone through December of that year, and it was helpful because my only income at that point was $500 on the GI Bill of Rights, and that, along with what Jo Anne’s parents paid for her room and board, was what we lived on. We had a three-room apartment within walking distance of the Hilltop Campus, and Jo Anne could take a bus to the Medical School.
I was pretty happy, and I learned a little bit about OT because Jo Anne’s classmates would frequently study at our apartment. My days consisted of going to classes in the morning, studying in small groups in the afternoon, and studying on my own at night, or writing whatever papers were required. But we did a lot of our research as a group, which was good. It was a good learning experience for me; some of my classmates earned better grades than I got, but it didn’t matter in the long run. We had a class in production planning, and I had had two years of engineering; I could read plans, and I was teaching my classmates a lot of things and they ended up with higher grades than I did.
The Felson Family 