Memoirs of A Healer/Clinical Social Worker: Autobiography of Bruce Whealton

Chapter 5: A New Life Awaits - University Life Begins

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I went off to college for the first time. I had been preparing to go to college my whole life in one way or another. That's all I knew – that for me, success would come only after college. My father went to college and got a degree in engineering then he went to graduate school.

I decided on engineering because even when I was so shy, I could still excel in class as far back as I can remember. It was math and science where that was most evident. It seemed easiest for a shy boy to succeed in these areas. I didn't have to explain my answers. There was no subjectivity. I just had to come up with THE answer – often a number. If it was right, I would move on.

That picture of life was dull and cold. My father had told me that childhood was the best time of our lives which made life seem rather frightening. The only hope of pleasure or enjoyment came from material success, money, savings, and assets.

I would later find out that this was not true and in fact, the best times of my life were NOT when I was growing up.

Dear reader, keep reading to find out about the best years of my life which are coming soon.

How to build lasting connections of my own, a family, a meaningful life, I figured I would find out somehow, on my own.

Looking back, I can say these things. I was lost in many ways though. Torn in different directions. What passed as guidance was more akin to the indoctrination of fears about how things could go wrong if I didn't prepare and plan for the future.

The ideas about what might make me happy were the farthest thing from my mind. Individual thinking had never been encouraged growing up. Having a different point of view would be misunderstood by our parents. It might come across as a challenge to their values even if that was not your intention.

I would discover that you could value both individual differences, interests, and preferences and you can place a high value on relationships.

I also knew that engineering was going to be very challenging but that was consistent with the overall theme of how I viewed life in general.

We didn't have guidance counselors in high school that helped us carefully plan our future based on the best career choices for each student. I had not been exposed to psychology at all before I went off to college. This is relevant when you consider what would end up being the right career for me. The very practical tools of psychology can help people deal with life's challenges and problems. But I'm getting ahead of my story.

I was the oldest sibling and the best in school. Academic accomplishments are not everything but so far in our family, it had seemed like the only measure that existed for us.

We showed up in Atlanta, Georgia where the Georgia Institute of Technology, aka Georgia Tech, is located, on a hot day in August of 1984, just over two months after my high school graduation. I had graduated 13 out of 565 at Southington High School in Southington, Connecticut.

Parents are invited to join the students for orientation. We all arrived sometime shortly before classes would begin for the fall quarter - yes, we had quarters instead of semesters like some schools have (semesters occur 3 per year and quarters are 4 per year).

The south overall is much less populated than the north but Georgia Tech is situated nearly in the center of the city of Atlanta, GA. I had grown up in a town that had a population of roughly 30,000 and now I was in a city with a metropolitan population of about 5 million. To call this a culture shock would be an understatement.

I felt a mixture of pride and fear as we turn into the campus. Dad was driving.

We were looking for the Student Center. The first things we saw were some athletic fields and the Basketball stadium. Then we came across the fraternity houses - I just knew that was what we were seeing. They all had three Greek letters on the outside.