Speakers share success stories with students

LYNN – Matt Curtis said when he was a teen he’d see kids from Marblehead and Swampscott and think those are the kind of kids who go to college.”They were what success was,” he said. “I wasn’t.”He was wrong.Curtis, a 2005 Lynn English High School graduate, spoke to Classical High School sophomores and juniors Friday as part of the Harvard Alumni Association’s Early College Awareness program. Program co-chairman and Classical alumni Peter Mazareas said the program launched the “Making the Curriculum Real” speakers series. It’s designed to get students thinking about college by introducing them to Harvard alumni, many local, who have overcome a variety of obstacles to get where they are.He is a Harvard graduate who was captain of the football team his senior year but Curtis assured students it was only hard work and a belief in himself that got him there.”My parents divorced when I was two and I bounced back and forth between my mother and father,” he said. “I lived on Lewis Street with my mother then in the Highlands with my father and in Curwin Circle, which you can see from here. It was really tough.”The Department of Social Services were regular visitors, there were times the family had no food or hot water or even toilet paper, he said.His father died when he was 16 and he went to live with his sister because his mother, an alcoholic/drug addict, could not care for him. And although he called college a totally foreign notion, he did not give up on it.Minela Gacanovic told students not to let the idea of loans scare them. She has plenty but she’s paying them off, and it’s worth it, she said.Gacanovic immigrated from Bosnia by way of Germany with her family in 1999. She was 10 years old and even then no thought she was bright enough to attend college, she said. She graduated as valedictorian of Classical in 2007 and cum laude from Boston College’s Carroll School of Management in 2011. She worked on Wall Street for two years “rubbing elbows with the 1 percent,” and now is a Senior Analyst in Foreign Exchange Trading for Merrill Lynch Bank in Boston.”All of you can go to college,” she said. “You can find a way to pay for it, utilize the people around you ? If I had listened to everyone around me including my parents, I wouldn’t have gone to school.”Mazareas also warned students not to let the cost of education deter them because the cost of not getting a college degree is far higher. According to statistics provided by Mazareas, the average salary of someone with a bachelor’s degree is $45,500 but that plummets to $28,000 for someone with only a high school diploma.”That’s a $1.2 million difference over the course of a lifetime,” he said.For those still doubting, Classical 2008 graduate Alex Watler, who also attended Harvard, reminded students, “If a Classical education was good enough that I could compete in Harvard, it can get you anywhere you want to go.”Martha Savery, director of Public Affairs at the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, stressed that there is money to help students pay for college but they need to work for it. She urged them to have a solid grade point average, fill out the appropriate forms and if they need help, ask for it.Mazareas also urged students to start thinking about college now. He told them to set goals, think about standardized tests and possible careers, work hard and believe that they can actually do it.Curtis told students to be prepared to fail but don’t ever feel like you don’t belong in college.”We all have similarities,” he said pointing to other speakers. “We all worked hard, we all overcame obstacles. We were all you.”