Tag: Chaim Shapiro

People who are out of work will often use every means at their disposal to find employment. Career Fairs are a popular way for employees and employers to meet on a large scale. Instead of (or more likely, in addition to) sending endless resumes, a Career Fair allows the job seeker to meet with multiple employers in a short time frame.

The first six sections of my story have focused on my struggles adapting to a strange college environment forced on me against my will. While that story is self-contained, I thought it would be worthwhile to at least partially answer the main question my book will address: What ended up happening to me? This is a fast-forwarded account that describes my watershed moment as a college student.

While things might have seemed very strange in this foreign college environment, especially because I was tossed in without any roadmap to help me navigate and understand the kinds of things I was seeing all around me, there was one area I was not worried about: academics. Northeastern Illinois has a rather derogatory nickname, “Northeasy," and it does not have a very good academic reputation. I didn’t think my classes would be very hard at all.

Realizing that there was no backing out of college at this point, I resigned myself to my fate. I was in college, like it or not, but I didn’t believe that I really belonged in college.

Within the span of just a few weeks, everything I knew about myself and all of my plans were destroyed. I was out of yeshiva, living at home and enrolled in classes at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU).

Suddenly and abruptly, everything I had always known about myself no longer applied. There would be no long yeshiva career, Kollel or the like. At that point I really had no identity. I didn’t know who I was or what it was that I was going to do.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, especially not to me. I could give you all the stats: my great-grandfather learned in Radin with the Chofetz Chaim, my grandfathers learned in Slobodka and Novardik, and my father has smicha from Ner Yisroel in Baltimore. Outside of the brief fantasy (which lasted a lot longer than I care to admit) that I would be the star player who takes the Chicago Bears to the Superbowl, I always saw myself in yeshiva. It is what I had always planned to do, and I never really contemplated anything else

I want to make it clear that this article in no way is meant to blame any of the people involved in what appears, by all accounts, to have been a tragic accident when a Brooklyn school bus killed a 4-year-old boy in Boro Park on February 17. But as a father who knows the pain of burying his own children only too well, I believe that it is important to ask if there is any room for improvement in our school bus safety procedures.