I had made a simple phone call to “find out what my options were,” and the thing had taken on a life of its own

A

s I trudged up three flights of cement stairs in an old brick building on 45th St. in Boro Park on a freezing Wednesday morning, all I could think was, how in the world did I get myself into this?

There was a window on the landing. I caught sight of my reflection as I passed it: white shirt, dark jacket, full beard, 23 years old. A regular chassidishe guy from Boro Park. About to begin my first day at a three month math workshop, in preparation for an attempt to get into college.

If you had told me when I got married three years ago that I would be here, I wouldn’t have believed you. In fact, if you had told me three days ago that I would be here, I wouldn’t have believed you.

It’s not that college was so foreign to me. My wife had just finished her degree in speech therapy, and her brother, who is younger than me, was already in his first semester for accounting. My older brother is a CPA, and one of my sisters has a degree in web design and development. Although I was still in kollel, there was always a growing awareness that eventually I would need a plan for parnassah. I had tutored kids on the side; I had dabbled a little, made a couple of deals, managed not to lose too much money. But the writing was on the wall—I needed a real plan. I knew I wasn’t the entrepreneur type, and a college degree took time, so maybe it was smart to start thinking about it.

The thing was, I had absolutely zero idea of what I might want to major in. Other than accounting and speech therapy, I didn’t even know what the options might be.

“Touro has a med school track,” I told my wife. We were standing in the kitchen, discussing my future college career as a hypothetical possibility, the way you talk about something that’s probably never going to happen, so you’re free to imagine any outcome, no matter how outrageous it might seem. “But it probably involves way too much math.” I’m really not a math person.

“You would love political science,” she said.

“How exactly is that going to become a source of income?”

“Why don’t you just call them and find out what your options are?”

That didn’t sound too threatening. I figured it couldn’t hurt.