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People who changed course

These are twenty-three real people, and one made-up example that we label as made up. Not one of the twenty-three took a straight road to what they're known for, and a change of course that nobody writes about counts too. Stories like these can't tell you what's likely for your teen, or for you, and none of them is a promise. The sources for each story are at the bottom of the page.

People who left college

What college still gave them

Matt Damon

Matt Damon studied English at Harvard. In Anthony Kubiak's playwriting class, he skipped the assigned one-act play and handed in one act of what became Good Will Hunting. Kubiak gave him an A and told him to keep going. Damon left about 12 credits short of a degree to take a part in the film Geronimo, and the script he'd started in that class won him an Oscar. He never finished the degree, but in 2013 he went back to Harvard to receive its Arts Medal.

David Byrne

David Byrne studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and then the Maryland Institute College of Art. After about two and a half years, he says, he realized he was self-motivated enough not to need school, and he left in the early 1970s. At RISD he'd met Chris Frantz, and in New York the two started Talking Heads with RISD classmate Tina Weymouth. Their 1977 debut album included "Psycho Killer," which reached the Billboard Top 100 the following year.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs left Reed College after six months. He had no idea what he wanted to do, he couldn't see the value in college, and his working-class parents' savings were going to his tuition. He stayed on for about 18 months as a drop-in and took a calligraphy class from Robert Palladino. By his own account, he was 20 when he and Steve Wozniak started Apple in his parents' garage. Jobs said that without that class, the first Macintosh, designed ten years later, would never have had multiple typefaces.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey went to Tennessee State on a full scholarship. When a TV station offered her a job, she first said no, because her father insisted she finish school. She told a professor. He spoke to her father, and she took the job. At 19 she became Nashville's first African American female coanchor of the evening news. She finished senior year one credit short, and Tennessee State later let her earn it with a paper and some of her shows.

Jack Horner

Jack Horner enrolled as a geology major at the University of Montana. He says he flunked out of college seven times. An adviser wrote five letters of support so he could keep returning. He left without a degree, having taken the geology and zoology courses that mattered. In 1978 he and his college friend Bob Makela found baby duck-billed dinosaur fossils, the first evidence that dinosaurs cared for their young. In 1982 Montana State's Museum of the Rockies recruited him.

People who were stuck, then changed course

Each story names the path it fits

George Lucas

Path: Community college

George Lucas had planned to become a professional race car driver. A car crash in June 1962 ended that plan. He spent two years at Modesto Junior College, a community college, where he began shooting 8mm film. He wanted to go to Art Center in Los Angeles to be an illustrator, but his father disapproved. He took the USC entrance exams alongside a friend, and the program turned out to be a cinema school. He graduated from USC in 1967, and Star Wars came out in 1977.

Adam Steltzner

Path: Community college

Adam Steltzner did just enough in high school to graduate and never picked up his diploma. He played bass in rock bands while friends went to college. After a gig in 1984, he saw Orion in a different place in the sky and went to College of Marin, a community college, to take an astronomy class. Astronomy required physics first, and he was hooked. Three semesters later he transferred to UC Davis. In 2012 he was lead engineer of the team that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Denzel Washington

Path: University

Denzel Washington started at Fordham University in pre-med, then moved to pre-law, then journalism. One semester his GPA was 1.8, and Fordham suggested he take some time off. In his words, his lowest point came at 20. He helped in his mother's beauty shop and worked that summer as a counselor at a YMCA camp in Connecticut. After a talent show there, another counselor asked if he had ever thought of acting. He went back to Fordham that fall, switched to drama, and finished his degree.

Harrison Ford

Path: Skilled trades

In his third year of college, Harrison Ford has said, he was a little lost. He didn't finish his degree. Columbia Pictures ended his seven-year deal after 18 months. He became a carpenter to supplement his income, with no formal training, and on one job he went to the library for reference material whenever a problem stumped him. Carpentry paid enough for him to step away from TV work. Star Wars in 1977 was his breakthrough role. In 2026 he said he struggled for about 15 years, moving between acting jobs and carpentry.

Julia Child

Path: Skills and certificates

Julia Child grew up in a wealthy Pasadena family. In 1939 she was fired for insubordination, and later the WAVES and the Women's Army Corps turned her down because of her height. PBS says her life had no real direction until her World War II volunteer service. In 1948 her husband Paul's work took them to Paris, where she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and earned its diploma in 1951. She published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961 with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

Gordon Ramsay

Path: Skills and certificates

Gordon Ramsay moved to Banbury, England, and lived with his sister. He began his culinary training at 19, and he has said he got into catering as a way of becoming independent. The Banbury Round Table paid for his first set of chef's whites and knives, he says. He finished a hotel management degree at North Oxfordshire Technical College in 1987, then trained under some of Europe's top chefs. He opened Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London in 1998, and it had three Michelin stars by 2001.

George Foreman

Path: Free job training

Left before finishing high school

George Foreman left school in Houston after ninth grade. He wrote in his autobiography that he never seemed to get enough food. In August 1965 Job Corps assigned him to a center near Grants Pass, Oregon. There he learned to lay bricks, and a fellow trainee asked him about boxing. He learned to box in California and won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1968 Olympics after about 20 amateur fights. In 2015 Job Corps honored him as one of ten Graduate Heroes.

Cathy Lanier

Path: Healthcare and first responders

Left before finishing high school

Cathy Lanier left high school and had a baby at 15. By 17 she was on food stamps and back with her mother, who taught her to type at the kitchen table so she could take a secretary job. She earned a GED, waited tables, and sold awnings. In 1990, she joined the D.C. police, drawn by a program that offered to cover her tuition. She rose from patrol officer to district commander to chief in 2007, and she earned two graduate degrees.

Bill Withers

Path: Trucks, planes, and ships

Bill Withers was born in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a coal-mining town, and decided to leave to avoid the grueling work his father did in the mines. He enlisted in the Navy at 17 and spent nine years in the service as an aircraft mechanic. After the Navy he bought a guitar at a pawn shop and recorded demos. His first album came out in 1971, and he kept his day job as an aircraft assembler because he thought the music business was fickle. He later won three Grammys.

Barrington Irving

Path: Trucks, planes, and ships

Barrington Irving believed college football was his only way to higher education. He met a pilot at his parents' bookstore and first said no, because he didn't believe he was smart enough to become a pilot. The pilot took him to see a Boeing 777. Irving turned down football scholarships, saved money from odd jobs, and enrolled at Florida Memorial University. He earned private and commercial pilot licenses. In 2007, at 23, he finished a solo flight around the world in a plane built from donated parts.

Chris Pratt

Path: Paid work

Chris Pratt took community college acting classes but left college after less than a semester. He moved to Hawaii after a friend offered to buy him a one-way ticket. He lived in a van by the beach and worked minimum-wage jobs, including waiting tables in Maui. His big break came while he was waiting tables: Rae Dawn Chong came in. He spoke up about the acting he'd done in high school plays, and she cast him in a movie. He got a role in the series Everwood in 2002.

Ina Garten

Path: Their own business

Ina Garten worked on nuclear energy policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget. She has said her days and evenings felt backwards: she loved hosting dinner parties after hours. At 30, she saw an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons and made an offer after seeing it once. The owner accepted the next day. She and her husband, Jeffrey, bought it in 1978 with a second mortgage on their D.C. home, and he commuted on weekends while she ran it.

Sara Blakely

Path: Their own business

Sara Blakely spent seven years selling fax machines door to door. At 29, with about $5,000 she'd saved, she started Spanx. She wrote her own patent application and found a hosiery mill after multiple rejections. Sales reached $4 million in the first year.

Scott Kelly

Path: Military service

Scott Kelly spent 13 years staring out of school windows, according to a University of Tennessee profile. At 18 he read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, which he later called the spark that set his course. After the book, he began attending class and studying. He was in Navy ROTC at SUNY Maritime College and graduated in 1987 with an electrical engineering degree. He flew F-14 fighter jets for the Navy, then commanded the International Space Station on three expeditions.

Adam Driver

Path: Military service

Adam Driver finished high school in 2001 with no plans for college. When Juilliard turned him down, he applied nowhere else and sold Kirby vacuums door to door. After 9/11 he said he needed to do something, and in 2002 he enlisted in the Marines. He served until 2004, then used the GI Bill at the University of Indianapolis and acted in several plays. A second audition for Juilliard got him in. He co-founded Arts in the Armed Forces, which puts on theater for service members.

Matthew McConaughey

Path: Gap year

Matthew McConaughey planned to be the family lawyer. In 1988, at 18, he went to Australia as an exchange student. He has said he was lost there, writing 16-page letters to himself, and that he turned to poetry to make sense of it. He started at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989 and kept the law plan for a year. A friend gave him the confidence to go to film school, where he studied behind the camera. His breakthrough was Dazed and Confused in 1993.

Bryan Cranston

Path: Arts and sports

Bryan Cranston joined a police Explorers program at 16 and went to Los Angeles Valley College to study police science. In his second year he took an acting class as an elective, and he has said it began his confusion about which direction to take. He and his brother left on motorcycles in 1976 and were gone for two years. At 22 he decided to become an actor. His first acting job was in a deodorant soap commercial, and by 2012 he had won three Emmys for Breaking Bad.

Marcus (made up)

Path: Paths with more support

A made-up example. We couldn't find a public story for this path that fit our rules, so this one is invented, using facts from the Paths with more support page.

Marcus is 18, in the spring of his senior year, with an IEP (Individualized Education Program) and no plan. Every talk at home ends with "we'll figure it out." His dad asks the IEP team about transition planning, the goals and services for after high school. The team goes through what's open in their state, which varies a lot. Marcus picks an 18-to-21 transition program and asks about supported employment too. At 19 he is in the transition program, with a routine and a short list of likes and dislikes.

Shania Twain

Path: Caring for family

At 18, Shania Twain went to Toronto to try to build a singing career. She got by on odd jobs, including a stint at McDonald's. After her parents died in 1987, she supported her three younger siblings. For three years she did it by singing at the upscale Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, Ontario, and she kept writing songs in her free time. A Nashville impresario discovered her at the resort, and she signed a record deal with Polygram Records.

Where these facts come from (69 sources)

Every story links to the pages it comes from, grouped by person. Last reviewed October 2026.

Matt Damon