From Campbells to Cambridge

This entry is not so easy to write. I’ve worried that this blog might mistakenly be interpreted as either a “poor me” story or as bragging about how in the face of adversity I got into Harvard. But telling the simple truth of my story is what matters to me.

I wish to share about my experience of going from a family on welfare and food stamps to being accepted to graduate school at Harvard University.

My parents met at the University of Connecticut in about 1964 and had me when my mom was 22 and dad was 26. A year later they had my sister Terri. For complex reasons my dad left when I was about 5 years old and from then on we saw him saw him about one month a year in the summer. He was unable to provide financial support. I’ve looked from many angles at my dad’s actions and have concluded that he was relatively young and could not take this kind of responsibility. I’ve learned to understand him a lot more over the years and to forgive him as much as I am able.

My sister and I agree that our mom was a courageous hero, giving all that she had. It is difficult for us to imagine how she could have given more and because of her we averted tragedy. She had about 2 years of college science classes under her belt from UCONN and eventually found a nursing program in the Napa Valley. I remember how we suddenly packing everything into a U-Haul and drove up Highway 5 toward Napa. My mom was understandably anxious and at times was on the edge of panic attacks. When we arrived in Napa we lived first in a cheap hotel room and then in low income housing. My mom applied for welfare and even food stamps. As hoaky as it might sound, I use the term Campbells for this blog because it represents cheap canned food, the kind you buy when you are on welfare. If it had not been 1972 in the United States with welfare available the benefits that came to women as a result of the Equal Rights Amendment) we would have been in deeper trouble.

At one point we lived in a friend’s home and later, because of my mom’s desire to live communally, be part of the “back to the land” movement, and to save money, we lived in a kind of commune/co-housing arrangement on our friend’s 44 acres in the western Napa Valley. We could not afford an elaborate structure so we built a simple “pod” which amounted to a wooden deck and a pea pod-like structure with a pot belly stove and a camode that consisted of a hole in the ground. At times we had no electricity although that was in part from choice as the adults preferred kerosene lamps.

After 4-5 years there our communal friends became devotees of guru Adi Da and we had to move into the town of Napa. I remember my mom being nervous about finding affordable housing and her relief at being told that we could rent the back in-law space of a friend’s home. This space amounted to one large room and a bathroom for all three of us. A year or two later we moved “up” to a one bedroom basement apartment and a bunk bed for my sister and me. It was cramped. After a year or two in that arrangement we moved in with a family of four and both myself and the son of that family slept in a converted garage space. Both because of limited space and because of the relatively low consciousness of the Napa public schools, I remember having a very difficult time. Like many public schools, there were bullies who said hurtful things about being poor.

Thanks to the hard work of my mom and some careful planning, when I was 13 and my sister was 12 we moved to the Berkeley Hills neighborhood of Kensington. We were the only family in Kensington that needed to live communally so as to afford the rent. We were probably the only family in Kensington who did not own their home. I worked first as a paper boy for the Oakland Tribune and then as the boy who closed down the local Young’s Market meat department/deli. Every afternoon I worked for about an hour with tasks such as clearing off large equipment, putting meat away in a large refrigerator, emptying a large barrel of oil and wiping down surfaces. I was very aware of our economic situation.

My elementary school years were spent in a lower-lower-middle class context while in my teens we were middle class but surrounded by kids who were upper middle class and had many extras. My friend Andrew had a new car by the age of 16 and many kids took regular vacations to Tahoe.

I’m 1/8 Spanish and about 1/4 Jewish, and after years of having a Peruvian, Spanish-speaking baby-sitter and learning Spanish in California public schools, I remember spending time with other poor Hispanic kids in East Bay areas and knowing intuitively that my life was, in many ways, more similar to theirs than to the mostly middle class and upper-middle class kids of my Kensington neighborhood.
I struggled in various areas of my life but managed to be successful in two areas: tennis and academics. In some ways the statement that education is the “great equilizer” was true for me. I had no consistent dad to check in on my progress at school. My mom spent a lot of time working and was not able give us some of the financial support we needed. That said, my mom was an incredibly loving mom emotionally and gave us a lot of hope, as well as a sense of community.

Due to the lack of awareness and organization of public school administrators, I was put in the classes with lower to middle performing students. Eventually teachers noticed that I earned A’s and moved me up. By sophomore year I was in “high stanine” courses and by senior year in AP courses. I did not fit in very well socially with these kids but performed well academically. At the end of El Cerrito High School I had a 3.8 GPA. I was considered in the category of a geek/nerd, did not socialize much and did not even know what it meant to drink until I was 17.

The upper-middle class homeowner’s kids generally received private SAT tutoring and some had outside college counselors who charged parents to counsel/coach them to get into the best schools. We had one college counselor–Jennifer Allaire–at El Cerrito High and when I went into her office at the beginning of my senior year I was not even clear what college was. We did not discuss it at home. To my mom’s credit, she put more emphasis on communication and living a full life; I hold no resentment toward her and deeply appreciate who she was for us.

I was aware that there was a huge college called UC Berkeley the next town over but was not sure what it actually meant to go to college. Jennifer was surprised that my grades were high and that I had little to no idea of what to do with them or what it meant to have good grades. I feel so fortunate that she could devote a little time to help me apply to the UC network of schools. As it turns out I was accepted into the freshman class at UC Berkeley.

At Berkeley I was exposed to even more upper-middle class privilege. The privileged Marin County, Lafayette, Los Angeles and New York (just to pick a few examples) kids seems like alien to me and I had no idea what they were talking about or what they were doing with their money, connections and social capital. They knew things about society and how to navigate within it that were completely foreign to me. When I attended a fraternity or sorority party I was looked at (in my interpretation) as a lower-middle class semi-hippie kid from a public school. I did not understand the music, popular culture and film references they made. But I did not know the musical groups that were more closely associated with middle and upper middle-class communities. I also did not have the kind of support that a college student needs to truly excel academically, such as how to identify the best major given my talents, interests and capacities. I had no ideal how to find and connect with the best professors, how to go about getting to know professors in office hours, and how to study efficiently. I literally watched the upper-middle class kids rise up the ranks, get better grades, take GRE tests and get into law or medical schools right after college. It was as if this process of moving up the ladder was the most natural thing in the world for them to do. Many of them were guided by mom, dad, and other family and friends who were alumni of Berkeley or other similar schools. I paid for Berkeley with Pell Grants (for low income kids), loans and a tiny contribution from my parents. Luckily it only cost a little over $1000 a year for tuition at a UCB. Nevertheless, by the end of college I did not have the understanding or training in what it took to get into a competitive graduate school.

Upon graduation in 1990, in the midst of post-Tiennamen Square, the Fall of the Berlin Wall/Communism, and the First Iraq War, I experienced a rude awakening–the awareness that I was in the lower-middle class of society and would have to work every day for several hours at the equivalent of about $15/hour while paying off my college loans. I could barely afford rent, did not have a car, and actually went back to live at my mom’s for a while.

Just after college I spent most of my time with my girlfriend Kristi (who was upper-middle class from Marin County), and my best friend Chris (who was also upper-middle class and whose dad was a lawyer). My life was rocked by the transformative education of Landmark Education. My greatest interests were this kind of transformative education, group counseling, and Vipassana meditation retreats. I also had a burning desire to find and create a community movement; something that would feel like a family. I stayed frequently at my girlfriend Kristi’s community house in Berkeley and started to talk to friends about community. A major turning point occured when I recognized when my best friend Chris and I decided to consciously create community. Community had been, after all, part of what “saved” my family from deep trouble. I decided to employ this attitude of community inclusion to more areas of my life. One summer I met a recent UC Santa Cruz grad named Erwan Davon who was spending 2 weeks at our community house while visiting a friend who lived there. Erwan and I had a series of intense and life-altering conversations about the phenomenon of community, and together organized three 5-hour “encounter groups” with the overt intention of creating community. The participants were all made up of friends of mine. Erwan and I facilitated these encounter groups in a way that created extraordinary results. In these early years we brought together what would later be called “The Old School Community” and we named it, appropriately, “The Community.” This included friend like Stuart Gillfillan, Adam Coutts, Chris Birkner, Jamie Kahl and Rich Reinholdt. Over the next 20 years it grew into a community of literally hundreds of people made up of several different sub-communities like The Community, Rhythm Society, Arete, Life As Art, Authentic World and more.

If I had had the money, family, resources and/or free time I would have entered a good education or counseling program in these early 1990′s. Instead I devoted my time to volunteering at Landmark and helping friends like Erwan and Jerry Candelaria use this community of friends to fill transformative weekend workshops they developed. Lacking any kind of “financial education,” rather than focusing on my own career, I focused on creating community which ultimately helped to fill the transformative courses of my friends. Once again, I watched upper-middle class people in their 20′s go to grad school, often with the help and connection either directly from their family or indirectly from the power of the “family conversation.” I watched from the sidelines the very real impact of the privilege that came from having money and thus power and opportunity. The need to pay bills, including college loans, contributed to my not going to grad school building my own career.

I did what provided the best possible paycheck…I taught and did informal counseling the inner city public schools. In the time period between the mid-90s’ and mid-00′s I taught almost every subject at almost every secondary education (6-12th) grade level. I unintentionally became a specialist in general interdisciplinary education. I accidentally became a “general specialist.” Eventually I managed to land a job teaching Communications and Critical Thinking in a General Studies program at the equivalent of a Junior/Career College. I was an informal school counselor and taught 12th grade Psychology at one point. I was also a school director for a few months. Soon I found that I knew a little bit about everything in education, including counseling. Because I wore so many hats in education I understand how all subjects in schools are interconnected and part of a web, network or system. This awareness dovetailed well with the popularity of the integrated education-Green-interdisciplinary education movement. Quite by mistake and by trial and error I was uniquely positioned to know a lot about “integrated” or “whole child” education.

To my surprise, three years ago I learned that most top schools of education, due to our increasinly interconnected world, had recently developed some form of integrated-interdisciplinary-interdepartmental graduate education programs. The essays and statements of purpose I wrote for Columbia Teachers College’s interdisciplinary doctorate education program in New York City were more natural and authentic for me to write than probably any other students who applied to that program. In the application I simply described the way my career had gone and what seemed obvious to me.

I was accepted into a doctorate program in Education at Columbia! The professors I met who understood this new wave in education naturally liked my views and office hour discussions tended to be long, fulfilling and mutually satisfying. They appreciated my background in SF Bay Area “transformative education” and thought my way of connecting the concept of Fractal images to education and learning were novel. I was the top student in one of my doctorate classes and unexpectedly played the role of part student-part graduate student teacher’s aid.

My strong relationships with professors at Columbia and two A+ course led me to learn more about Harvard’s Graduate school of Education. I applied to their Interdisciplinary “Special Studies” program. The process was long and painstaking, including the GRE test and super confidential online letters of recommendation and elaborate essays and sample writings. I knew that they accepted a very small percentage of applicants.

To my shock I was accepted to Harvard’s program while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area this spring. At first I did not know how to take it and did not tell anyone. My shocked reaction reminded me of the line “How did I get here?” from the Talking Heads song titled “Once in a Lifetime.” Acceptance to Harvard went completely against my sense of identity as a poor White-Hispanic-Jewish kid who was not part of the priveleged class. I was a boy who grew up living with other families, in basement apartments and forms of co-housing. I was a boy with a mom on food stamps. My image of myself was one of not belonging, especially not at Harvard.

Such a boy does not go from Campbells to Cambridge.

Advertisement