Having discussed in the last chapter the challenges I faced upon arrival in the big city and beginning college at Georgia Tech, I want to talk a bit more about the other challenges that go along with making it as a student at Georgia Tech and/or graduating. We are all entitled to bragging rights if we make it at Georgia Tech. The engineering and related majors are particularly challenging. That is such an understatement that I will need to illustrate this during this chapter.

This information is important in understanding part of my character, intellect, judgment, planning, and time management skills in life. Science is important as a guiding principle to rational reasoning even in the human services field. This book is about my experience as a Clinical Social Worker. Of course, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, as I mentioned previously.

Any time I have doubts about my competency in life, I think back to what I accomplished at Georgia Tech. While it might seem like just an academic challenge there is more to it than that. Pacing is important!

To stay sane, I tried, like others, to take Friday afternoon through Sunday mornings off from classes and forget all about the homework assignments, the concepts being taught, the formulas, the calculations and just put it out of my mind. The best analogy was to think of pacing yourself for a marathon or some other endurance exercise. Only this exercise was mental - an ongoing exercise of your brain. When I say I was trying to stay sane, I mean we needed balance in our lives - entertainment, enjoyment.

The dangers of excessive stress and lack of balance in life...

I will tell anyone to this day that the more stressful your life is the more you MUST take time to include non-stressful leisure activities, time with friends and family, and so on. Balance. Self-care! Some people speak of burnout. I think a new term is necessary to describe what happens under excessive stress. This is something that I will discover many years later.

Before long, every student would develop a certain respect for one another, whether they were enrolled as a Mechanical Engineering major, Electrical, Chemical, Nuclear, or some other form of engineering or related majors.

Your social connections were very important as well. You needed to know people who know others who can help you plan how you are going to get through all your required courses.

It's also important to understand that there were "weed out" classes that everyone must take in their first year and a half roughly. They were called "weed out" classes because many students flunk out early and never return to Georgia Tech.

We were all required to take six sequential Calculus courses. Yes, six! Plus, there were several courses in physics and a course in chemistry that were required.

The years I spent in these science and engineering classes are a blur of blackboards filled with mathematic formulas.

Before I made it to my junior year, I had a sense of self-confidence for the accomplishments that got me this far. It was boring though and I would struggle to stay awake often. I kept thinking, what's the point of this? Why does this matter to anyone? How will it bring anyone happiness or meaning? I know it is necessary and technology does provide great things, but this was so dull.

I did have classes in the humanities as required electives. And I discovered psychology and I was fascinated by those classes. I even got a minor in psychology.

Looking back, I should have majored in English with a specialization in creative writing, which would have meant going to another school. Of course, I had no idea who I was and what interested me. This was a period of self-discovery. Late in my junior year, I thought of changing to majoring in psychology. I was in counseling for shyness, as I mentioned but eventually, I'd question my decision to major in engineering.

These insights into who I am and what interests me are important aspects of my story. They tell you, dear reader, who I am. I'll cover this in more detail later.

I would go on to get a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in computer engineering. An analogous term might be software engineering – getting a computer to do what we want it to do. I spent countless hours pulling my hair out trying to get "programs" to compile and then run on the mainframe computer.

It was all "logical" thinking. I thought engineers designed things but there wasn't anything creative about what we were doing in engineering.

You might wonder what I was doing on the weekends since I said that I tried to keep my mind off the assignments, formulas, and classes from the moment I left class on Friday until I woke around 11 AM or noon on Sunday.

First off, during the week when I was in classes, not every class was overwhelmingly stressful, and I was making friends. Around lunchtime, I would enjoy a meal at one of the restaurants just across from campus. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. Some of my friends were from the fraternity house but they weren't all guys. Girls would come by on the weekends and meet people and become friends.

We studied together many times or did our homework together. I'm talking about people from the frat house but also some of us taking a class would meet somewhere to study or work on the homework together. It wasn't uncommon to be up until 11 PM or later with studies/homework during the week.

Then we come to Friday and the last class. There might be a party at the frat house, or I'd go for dinner with friends and then just hang out with others. I was living there by my second year. It's hard to put my finger on it but I didn't quite feel like I fit in as a frat brother despite living there. I never spoke at the weekly meetings or held a role. Maybe it was all in my mind.

I don't remember my roommate Thomas acting like one of the guys. It's only in retrospect that I realize that I was more self-conscious of my sense of not fitting in at times than noticing that I wasn't any different than a few other members. I wasn't noticeably shy. I had plenty of friends and made friends fairly easily.

On Saturdays, I liked to take the MARTA – Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority – a subway that would run to places in the metro area away from downtown Atlanta. There was a mall on the north line that ran up Peachtree Street – Lennox Mall with a movie theater. It was my escape to see a movie. It took my mind off other stressors such as the demands of classwork.

I often was doing this alone – going to the movies on Saturday... even into my senior year when I was much more outgoing. I guess I enjoyed the escape and while I very much wanted to be around people, it was hard. The party scene or meeting new people. It wasn't very hard, but I was still learning skills and working on my fears.

In the sessions with my counselor – my psychologist, I learned ways to speak to people and to listen. For example, I learned about "free information" – the weather, something a person might be wearing, a shared experience like something from class. Then to keep the conversation going, I learned about active listening. That could mean summarizing what someone just said, rephrasing it in different words to confirm that you understand... asking follow-up questions and the best ones are open-ended.

I also learned a technique for dealing with social anxiety. Suppose I want to meet someone or just be more friendly. I was challenging my fears as opposed to not trying or telling myself something will go wrong. I learned a three-column technique based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. This is something I did all week actually. I had a pad of paper, a pen, or a pencil all the time.

I would imagine scenarios and ask myself "what is it that I fear if I acted instead of avoiding what I feared." It wasn't actually those words that I asked but there were so many examples that no single example can capture the essence of the fears. I mean if the fear is that I approach someone I don't know and say something foolish or incoherent, then avoiding the action avoids the negative emotions that might show up in the form of a racing heart.

That is just one of the countless examples and probably not a good one. Anyway, in column one, I write our automatic thought. He/she won't like me. She won't be interested in ME! Then in the middle column, I write the name of the "cognitive distortions that I can recognize. Maybe, for example, I am "predicting the future" which is a cognitive distortion, or I am "discounting the positive" – positive aspects of myself. There are common cognitive distortions that people use. In the third column, I wrote challenging statements. Depending on the situation, I might write about evidence of how I am liked by the friends that I have.

This is something I did every week, frequently, for years. See what I mean when I say that picking any one example might not convey the breadth of potential negative thoughts. To be clear, this happens to all kinds of people not just shy people. I was trying so hard. A simple way to figure out what the automatic thought was is to think about asking oneself, "what's the worst thing that can happen?"

Despite all the improvements I made, I never met girls directly at the parties at the fraternity house. However, I became friends with girls who started hanging out at the fraternity house often because they were girlfriends of one of the frat brothers. I have no idea how my friend Thomas met his later wife since he was geeky, not very outgoing at parties. Like me, Thomas never danced.