Meet the 79-year-old Rutgers freshman majoring in English
His first passion was chemical engineering
If you take an English class this semester, don’t be surprised if you see a student in your class who is 60 years your senior – his name is Bob Mostello, and he’s a 79-year-old freshman majoring in English here at Rutgers.
This isn’t Bob’s first time in college, quite the contrary. Bob’s first passion was chemical engineering for which he received his B.S., master’s and doctoral degrees in from NJIT and Steven’s Institute of Technology. He’s led a very successful life, co-authoring several important patents on industrial gas production.
But all of those years submerged in STEM studies have left him with “little time for the humanities” he admits. Last semester, Mostello took “Poets and Power in Late Medieval England” and “Principles of Literary Study.” He admitted that keeping up with the readings was quite difficult, a complaint that is familiar to most English majors. Despite that, he still received an A and a B for those courses.
In terms of him relating to his classmates, he says that he’s amazed that they know so much despite being fresh out of high school, and that they know of writers that he’s unaware of.
Mostello seems extremely excited for future English classes. After reading a sentence from Paradise Lost, he says “I guess I have a right brain and a left brain so I really love that stuff and it’s the beauty of it.”