I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.
I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The poor little kids.
Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.
My first day of high school, I wore brown boys' corduroys that my mom had sewn Sesame Street elastic into - they were my coolest pants - and a lime green Patagonia fleece that my mom found at Goodwill. I loved fleece.
Whatever I was doing, even when I was at school, I never repressed anything that I felt. I wasn't flamboyant; I was actually quite reticent most of the time. But if I felt I had to do something, I did it.
My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.
Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.
When I was in high school, I had already kind of been working in the industry and had done a couple of acting jobs. There were definitely some girls that were either jealous or thought I was a snob. I was just trying to be a teenage girl and go to high school and have fun like everybody else!
When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to 'Popular Electronics' magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion - a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest.
I was never on the side of the teachers at school. Even though I put all the work into getting the main role in the end-of-year musical when I was 11, they didn't give it me, even though they knew I should have had it. That sort of drove me into am dram and getting the main part in another production. And I did.
Parents need a full continuum of care and support from birth to kindergarten that is affordable and accessible - that means full day and full year. And let's not forget that even in elementary school, working parents need access to the same kind of quality, affordable after-school programs!
I remember my choir teacher in high school told me, 'When in doubt, sing loud.' I'm a terrible singer, but I always auditioned for the musicals, and would get cast in them because I really would just put it all out there. That was really good advice, and I think it works for everything, not just acting.
During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.
I'd knocked on doors when I'd gone to theater school in Los Angeles the summer of my junior year, trying to find an agent and submitting headshots, but nobody would see me, and I knew it was virtually impossible to get an audition if you didn't have an agent.
I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.
I hated speaking in public. I would miss school just so I wouldn't have to do it.
I always say that failure was my friend. I learned nothing at school, so I just lived in my own world.
Sports have always been a big part of my life. At school, I played a lot of different sports, and I was competing with other schools. I did everything: running, volleyball, basketball, soccer, Olympic-style gymnastics, and more! My history with sports gave me good concentration, focus, strength, and motivation to stay healthy.
But I'm not worried about seeking out the approval of others - that high school thing of joining the club.
Most every dental school has discount dental services.
I would love to encourage all my teammates to eat the best way they possibly can. High school athletes. Now, that's not the way our food system in America is set up. It's very different. They have a food pyramid, and I disagree with that. I disagree with a lot of things that people tell you to do.
People always make a lot about how I don't carry grudges. That's my religious upbringing. I went nine years without missing Sunday school. Lutheran. I can't live with hatred inside of me. That's what I learned. I ain't scared of dying, either.
I was a super nerd in school.
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
I was a hard rocker when I was in high school.
But I decided I wanted more education and I had to make a choice between starting law school, which was interesting to me, and going for a graduate degree in engineering.
I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn't set out to be a businessperson.
I quit high school to be a pro skateboarder out of Ohio, which is just asinine, but it was meant to be.
Widely distributed reports have noted in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro.
NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.
I wanted to write rather than do anything else. But 'cause I left school at 15, I didn't know what a noun was, still don't.
My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.
There's something intrinsically Australian about a bunch of brothers and school friends getting together as a band at a very young age and all pulling together as a band at a very young age and all pulling together as mates to make something happen.
I always had two or three jobs at the same time. I started doing yard work when I was 7 or 8. When I was 13, I got my first state job doing road construction. Between working, sports and school, I hardly ever had free time.
I would not call myself Catholic anymore, but I went to 16 years of Catholic school: grade school, high school and college.
