“A group of football players will be in a class, and the professor will generalize the whole group as a bunch of guys who don’t really care about school, they’re just there to play football,” he says. “They’ll nitpick any little thing they do. You are under the microscope.”
Like Cornelius, McKenzie had to prove himself academically before gaining the respect of his professors at Penn State. Although he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in three and a half years, he still felt that many professors expected the worst.
“I didn’t come to college just to play football. I came to get an education,” he says. “A lot of people don’t understand that when you are a collegiate athlete, some professors love you and some professors hate you. Some take a liking to you because you play sports, but others don’t like you at all and want to see you fail.”
— By Ikenna Ofobike
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
