My education

I give McDonogh a lot of credit for my education. At Duke, my four semesters of Chemistry were pretty easy given two years of Bob Smoot's classes in Chemistry and AP Chemistry. Dave Harley and Marty McKibbin didn't just teach history, but asked you to think about history in a way that didn't just require the memorization of dates. I breezed through college history as a result. The same with English, Math, and German. The only reason I wasn't a German major was that I waived the six required courses and there weren't enough electives to complete the graduation requirements (and I wasn't going to repeat courses I took at McDonogh). My undergraduate days were more of a time for maturing and socializing than gaining additional raw knowledge. Once I entered grad school, I had to regain the pace of soaking up facts, learning to absorb and command vast concepts, once again. It was a good thing that McDonogh prepared me for that. Many of my friends and relatives from the Eastern Shore didn't graduate from college; they weren't prepared as well as I was.