There’s always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If ‘Pi’ didn’t work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don’t think I would have gotten another shot at it. If ‘Requiem for a Dream’ didn’t work out, they would have called me a ‘one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump’.
YouTube came out when I was a sophomore in college, and I feel like I was one of the first people to put musical theater stuff online.
When I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist, pretty much to the left. But not when I left the university. I quickly got wise. I’d read about what had happened to Russia in 1917 when the Communists took over.
My sophomore year, I transferred from a public high school to an arts school, and, obviously, it didn’t have any sports for me to do.
My friends love to tease me about the fact that I won’t be able to drive until I’m a sophomore in college.
I was just this little theater geek. I joined the drama program my freshman year. I read the morning announcements my sophomore year. I didn’t have to eat in the cafeteria with everyone else because my drama teacher was cool. Everybody knew who I was, and that’s all I ever wanted as a theater kid.
I actually was the captain of the football team. I went to Catalina Foothills High School, and I played football all four years. I started on Varsity my sophomore year, and senior year I was captain.
When I got into all the grunge stuff, I really liked Hole. I actually saw them in concert when I was a sophomore in high school. It was kind of rare to see a successful female rocker get down and dirty with the guys. And Courtney Love did. It was fun to be a fan of something different.
I knew I did not want to be a doctor; my parents kept talking to me about that. I wanted to be an NBA player, but around freshman and sophomore year, I stopped growing, so that was the end of that.
By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That’s actually when I started writing, although I didn’t think of it then as something I might someday do.
I’ve read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I’m not one of them. I had practically no idea until one night in my sophomore year of high school.
Chapman pushes internships a lot, and starting the summer of sophomore year we started interning because we knew that was the best way to make connections.
I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father – who I had only recently met – died.
I had no relationship with my father. He was never around. I met him when I was a sophomore in college. I wanted to meet him that once. I asked why he wasn’t there for us. He said, ‘I had other obligations.’
It’s just like high school. If you’re a freshman or a sophomore, it’s hard to tell the seniors who’ve been through two, three, playoff games what to do.
I was at Pepperdine University in Malibu, and during my sophomore year, I played a dying burn victim on ‘ER.’ The makeup artist put burn makeup all over my body and I couldn’t move or eat for 12 hours. I lost 8 pounds that week.
When I was 12, we began hosting exchange students from Norway, Sweden, Japan and Spain. I soon realized there was a whole world out there. I was determined to spend my sophomore year in high school abroad. My school taught only Spanish, but I wanted to go to France, and I did.
Since my sophomore year in high school, I knew I didn’t want to do anything but be a professional athlete. I knew when I got to college there was no way anybody was going to stop me from being an NFL player.
Sophomore year, I got hit in the stomach playing football, and I was out of school for four months. I was in the hospital for two and then out of school for two.
I actually wanted to be a police officer like my dad for the longest time, up until my sophomore year in high school when I started doing plays. I did plays when I was little, but in high school, I started getting into acting.
You know, in college, your second year they expect you to have a sophomore slump.
I didn’t start writing music until I was a sophomore in college. I would steal my roommate’s guitar and sit on the front porch and kind of blend this weird spoken word and these little melodies over simple chords; that really started my whole journey as a musician.
In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college.
I was terrified of girls until sophomore year of high school. I couldn’t even borrow pencils from them. I’d have to wait until the teacher called me out on it, like, ‘Does anybody have a pencil for Teddy?’ because I’d be too scared to ask the girl next to me.
After college, I really looked at every single shot that I shot. Pretty much every shot in my sophomore year and my junior year and just watched my form. I watched how I shot it from 3, and I just noticed I was a very undisciplined shooter.
In college from my freshman year to my sophomore year, I always got better, and that’s just my mindset.
My sophomore year at high school, I spent $300 I had earned working at After School Matters for my first studio session. For a 16-year-old to sacrifice that much money was pivotal. It spoke a lot about how serious I was.
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