Of the 700-plus students in Howell High School’s Class of 2014, at least two were preparing to uproot their lives to study at schools in Manhattan. One was Kathleen Laituri, known to just about everyone in Livingston County as “the small-town dancer who became a Rockette” — although to me, who’d known her since middle school, she was just Kathleen, one of the smartest, funniest and humblest people I knew.
The other graduate heading to Manhattan was me.
Oh, to return to the glory days, when just being able to say you’d been accepted to a school like Pace or New York University was enough to feel like you’d made it. The problem is, once we get there, those of us who are the most anxious, the most hard on ourselves, the most fatally and dangerously intrinsically motivated, are suddenly competing with thousands of students just like us…