I\’ve often made mention of how much I screwed off in college. My freshman year, the only real research I conducted was a detailed survey of the stores most likely to sell my roommate beer. (He had a fake ID, I did not.)

Given my current occupation, I got a kick out of this Virginia Tech report card I found from the second semester of my freshman year in 1992:

Check out the grade for \”Intro to Government and Politics.\” Yep… that\’s not a misprint.

There actually is somewhat of an explanation. Virginia Tech had what they called the \”freshman rule.\” Basically, your first year, you could take six credit hours and \”freshman rule\” them, meaning the grade would show up on your transcript, but the actual grades wouldn\’t be factored into your GPA. Thus, the zero points I got for Intro to Government didn\’t count against my otherwise stellar 2.15 grade point average. Basically, the class was too early in the morning, and I wasn\’t doing well in it anyway, so I just stopped going – knowing I could just freshman rule it. Not knowing, of course, that Government and Politics would one day become my profession.

Incidentally, following this semester, I dropped out of school for a semester and moved to Brookfield to build houses with my uncle. I was completely broke and my father (justifiably) refused to send me any more money, given the grades I was getting. It was at this point that I voted for the first time, for Russ Feingold and Bill Clinton.