Meet Mike O’ Sullivan, the 42-year-old Rutgers student making us all look bad

Even though midterms are over, we twenty-something college students always have something to stress over.  Whether it be exams, assignments, internship searches, and not to forget the struggles of keeping up with our oh-so-important social lives. So what do you do when you feel so overwhelmed, you can’t even think straight? Normally, college students would rage and, or, dage to ignore our responsibilities and attend to our studies last minute  because us twenty-year-olds never have our priorities straight. Not Mike O’ Sullivan.

A 42-year-old ITI major at the School of Communication and Information, he’s not a conventional college student by society’s definition. He’s better.

The conventional, yet outdated standard of attending college happens usually right out of high school. However, in 1992, high-school-graduate Mike felt going right into the workforce after high school was more practical at the time considering he did not know what he wanted to do for a career. This is a fear that haunts us big, bad, college students day in and day out. Am I doing the right thing? Do I actually like my major? Did I just waste thousands and thousands of dollars just to be unemployed?

According to O’Sullivan, the priority, at the time, was paying bills and working over time at 18 years old and working with that mentality, you wrote your own paycheck. He worked at his local Fire Department, an overnight-delivery company, and was taking classes for his associates degree at Brookdale Community College,  until he got injured in 2007 and was forced to make some changes. Mike told me: “Once I got hurt I realized times have changed and there was no more good money without a college degree,” however, he did not know what career path to choose.

He stumbled upon User Experience and Design and Mobile Web App Development, classes offered by Rutgers, and decided to take them. After receiving an A in both classes, he decided the technology world was a career he wanted to pursue.

He applied to Rutgers but experienced the RUScrew very early by getting denied for not having any recent coursework history, even though he took two classes at Rutgers and had his associates, but when does Rutgers ever make sense in the decisions they make, am I right? So Mike had to “enroll in the fall of 2014 as non-matriculated,” and prove he could handle a college course load.

He didn’t have any pre-existing notions of Rutgers, not even the stereotype that we’re all sluts. (I think we’re shaping up guys), In fact Mike told me: “All of those rumors about Rutgers went in one ear and out the other. I couldn’t make a fair assessment about Rutgers since I have not experienced it in it’s entirety. I chose Rutgers because it has a great reputation and it’s well-respected.”

“Walking into my first college class I didn’t know what to expect. I was gambling on myself and I knew, obviously, I was the oldest student there and thought no one would talk to me but I was wrong.”

To take the edge off on the first day of classes, Mike thought it would be better to poke a little fun at himself. So, his fun fact about himself, that ever teacher dreadfully makes us do, was that his name was Benjamin Button, a movie character who is born an old man and gets younger everyday. He went on to say that the professors and TA’s knew what he had to do and helped him ever step of the way.

“The learning curve had changed since I went to school last. I had to learn quick and do well right from the get go.” And that he did. He got 3 A’s and 1 B+, which meant Rutgers let him study full time. “It was an incredible sense of satisfaction achieving something with the odds stacked against you.”

He continued taking classes in the spring and summer of 2015, however, his world was flipped upside when he was hit with horrible news about his father, who was suffering from stage four cancer. For a while, Mike’s life consisted of non-stop school and visits to his father in hospital in New York. Unfortunately, his dad passed away in November of 2015 but he “never missed a class, assignment, or an exam.”

“I got through it, and after the semester was over, I earned a 4.0 GPA. I wanted to honor my dad as best I could for his fight. The motto that powered me through the semester was ‘tough times don’t last, tough people do’.”

According to Mike, the key to success is stepping outside of your comfort zone. People make sacrifices for you to be successful, so you owe it to them and yourself to give it your best. Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed because for Mike, nice people helped him succeed.

So if the assignments are piling up and feel like you can’t catch a break, remember that there are people out there who are struggling just like you are. If Mike O’Sullivan can get a 4.0 during the lowest point in his life, you can do the same. Just remember “tough times don’t last, tough people do.”