In the Virtual Destination College program I work on at ScholarMatch, our volunteer college coaches spend much of the summer talking about “finding your college fit” with rising high school seniors as they work towards assembling a college list.

This, however, is the story of losing my college fit.

It’s the tale of my undergraduate years unfolding in defiance of the plans I thought I had for them. It’s a fable of how even though the main reason I chose the school I attended — the opportunity to study trumpet seriously and pursue a music degree — became one of the most frustrating parts of my undergraduate years, other influences on campus I hadn’t necessarily considered as a high school senior sparked some of the passions and interests most important to me today. Even if I’m still learning to embrace uncertainty, I take heart from the retrospective insight that some of the most powerful catalysts for my growth have occurred during what felt like periods of failure. Sheepishly, I’ve also learned to laugh at myself and recognize the simple but no less profound truth that many of my amazing friends and colleagues’ stories have echoed, in whatever form: the relationships I built on campus were the most meaningful part of of my college experience.

I.

Late in summer 2011, the horizon felt rich with possibility as I left San Francisco on a plane bound for Northeast Ohio. Soon I would land in Cleveland and ride for 45 minutes to Oberlin (population: less than 10,000), a college town surrounded by farmland. As an incoming double degree student, I knew that I would pursue a music performance major on trumpet, but had no idea what course of study I might land on in the liberal arts college.

If this story is about my college experience flouting what expectations I may have had for it, the first plot twist is that I even ended up at Oberlin.

Back before my senior year of high school, as I soul-searched about what would come next (“What do I want to do with my life? Where do I want to go for college?”), I latched on to my passion for music. I had gotten my start as a trumpet student in a fourth grade group class, and I’m indebted to the SFUSD music programs I came up through. In particular, the Hoover Middle School band program of the inimitable “Mr. Y” (Paul Yonemura) launched me into taking the instrument seriously and helped me discover how much music could give back if I poured myself into it. I continued to perform as a teenager in and out of school, with jazz bands, orchestras, and church gigs across the Bay Area. Few things in my life felt as electrifying as the energy of playing with other musicians for live audiences, and when my trumpet teacher started to refer me for paid engagements she couldn’t cover — and I could handle them! — I dared to dream of a life in music.

To put it mildly, my parents were not enthusiastic about the prospect of me only studying music. Reliant as I was on the privilege of their partial financial support, and grudgingly aware that some wisdom might indeed lie behind their concern, I focused on colleges with music programs alongside strong conventional academics. Oberlin was one such school, but I only applied because of the regional auditions they offered in SF, sparing me the need to fly out to Ohio as a candidate. My final decision came down to UCLA and Oberlin, and I was lucky that my financial aid package for the latter made the net price comparable to the former, even with in-state tuition. I never imagined that I’d end up in the Midwest, but given the choice I felt drawn to something different than the large California public schools I’d grown up in.

II.

Late one evening during the fall of 2014, I sit with my trumpet on my lap, look at myself in the mirror of the practice room I am in, and cry.

In the buzzing hive of music-educational resources that is the Oberlin Conservatory, it feels like the one resource I need the most — my body — is failing me. I should be clear: I am in otherwise perfect physical (if not mental) health, and this reckoning with my trumpet playing is one I’m lucky to afford. But over the previous year, I’ve developed a stutter when I try to start notes (imagine Colin Firth over the first half The King’s Speech, but on trumpet) and the embouchure I’ve long taken for granted is malfunctioning. I can point to accumulated stress and performance anxiety, as well as an unfortunate non-alignment between my trumpet professor’s pedagogy and the approaches which work for me as reasons for this breakdown, but mostly I don’t understand why it’s happening.

My musicality, knowledge of theory and history, and creative ideas are expanding into universes I never imagined, while the technical capacity at my disposal to express these ideas is falling apart. Devoting more hours to practice has, up to this point, been my mantra for overcoming hurdles in trumpet craft, but now this equation nightmarishly inverts: the more time and effort I spend trying to resolve these short-circuits and hitches in my lips and breath, the worse they get. Rather than elevating my playing to the new heights I had dreamed of, the commitment I’ve made to pre-professional music training seems, somehow, to have made everything worse.

With the gradual collapse of my trumpet technique, I experience not only the loss of an expressive voice I had devoted more than a decade to cultivating, but also the crumbling of an identity I had spent just as long investing in.

My script for performing this identity, which had proudly declared “I am a trumpet player,” rather than just “I play trumpet,” leads to a vertigo-inducing vacuum of self-worth. The pressure-cooker context of a music school, where a community of mostly 18-to-24 year-old aspiring artists cannot help but intertwine social capital with instrumental ability, only intensifies this angst. My senior recital, which I have already postponed once, will be more of a grim survival of an institutional requirement than a celebration of my artistry. Some lines I write in the program notes hint at the near-ontological level on which I’m experiencing this struggle:

“When your technique obstructs you long enough from expressing your soul, it can start to feel like there’s something wrong with your soul (do your musical ideas still exist if you can’t express them, share them?)”

III.

Looking back, I can see that tendrils of hope and growth sprouted in new directions during the same semester in which the crux of this difficult musical process transpired.

Over on the liberal arts side of my college education, I chose to major in history after falling in love with the research and writing process. I still revere the brilliant history professors I was lucky to work with, but one of the best classes of my college career came from the Rhetoric department (praise be, liberal arts breadth!). In this seminar, “Teaching and Tutoring Writing Across the Disciplines,” the combination of our readings in composition pedagogy with the appointments we had as course TA’s or tutors in the writing center enabled the special kind of learning that can happen when theory and practice, knowing and doing, drive each other forward to generate nuanced and grounded insight.

I had taught music previously, but discovered that I enjoyed tutoring writing and teaching language even more. The best readings on the syllabus, from scholars like Nancy Sommers, helped me to more effectively support student authors and spoke to me as a soothing balm for the identity crisis I was negotiating:

“It is deeply satisfying to believe that we are not locked into our original statements, that we might start and stop, erase, use the delete key in life, and be saved from the roughness of our early drafts. Words can be retracted; souls can be reincarnated.” (Nancy Sommers, “Between the Drafts”)

For what it’s worth, this class played an important role in setting on me on the path that eventually led to ScholarMatch.

When I took a semester off and came home to SF in the spring of 2015, trying to decide if I was going to drop out of my music degree or see it through to the bitter end (I did end up finishing it, alongside my history major), the positive experience I’d had as a writing tutor led me to intern with 826 Valencia, ScholarMatch’s neighbor and sister organization. That experience in turn encouraged me to work with the Ninde Scholars Program, a college access and academic mentoring initiative in Oberlin, over my last year on campus.

After graduating I went on to teach English and work on a music history research project as a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, Austria, and considered applying to PhD programs in historical musicology. But as compelling as I found the investigations I was pursuing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would rather be working on dismantling barriers to access in higher education than on laboring on thrilling but obscure intellectual inquiry for a tiny, elitist, esoteric audience. That feeling is rooted in a set of commitments and critical lenses (summarized well by Griff Radulksi, among others) for which I have community at Oberlin to thank. Oberlin helped me internalize fierce critiques of interconnected systems of privilege, power and oppression, begin to name my positions and complicities in these systems, ask what I can do to make change, take action, and still show up at the end of the day with compassion for people in my life.

Two years out from Oberlin, some of “losing my college fit” still aches. I want to push myself, though, to take up Sommers’ invitation and revise the roughness of my early drafts. To what extent might I be able to reconstruct my narrative infrastructure, and tell a different college story? I wish that I could do away altogether with the dreary saga of my musical journey, but I need to be real: clearly, I am not yet over a compulsion to make that chapter of my story visible.

Even so, when I think now of my college years, the moments when I felt the strongest sense of “fit,” of meaning and purpose, did not come from even the best concerts I played or the most stimulating seminar discussions I participated in. They came from encountering the friends I stayed up late with, professors I got close enough to question, high school students I learned how to support. They came from forging chosen family in a new place. They came from runs in the snow, and laughter on beat-up couches.

Leo was born and raised in San Francisco. After graduating from SFUSD schools, he left the Bay to study at Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he earned degrees in History and Music. Leo’s passion for equity in education is rooted in his experiences teaching music and languages, tutoring writing, and administering non-profit programs in SF, Oberlin, Panama, and Austria. In particular, his work with the Ninde Scholars Program in Oberlin sparked his conviction in the value of carefully delivered college access mentoring. Leo is honored to be a part of the ScholarMatch family and to support the Virtual Destination College program. Outside of work, Leo can be found running and cycling around the city, and checking out too many books from the library.

#MyCollegeStory is a ScholarMatch original series highlighting the diverse and varied journeys to and through higher education. Check back each month for new stories!

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