I wasn't meant to be a cook. It's a profession I accidentally fell into one summer between college semesters while looking for an easy job as a waiter. Nobody would hire me as a server, but one restaurant, in desperate need of a prep cook, told me that if I could hold a knife, I could have a job.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Health coverage in the form of short-term, limited-duration plans has long been widely available to individuals in circumstances where they are unable to access traditional coverage, such as those between jobs or students taking a semester off from school.

Alex Azar

I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.

Alexi Zentner

At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.

Alice McDermott

I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy - and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.

Alton Brown

When I was around 18, I got kicked out of my parents' house, and I wasn't allowed to take anything with me. I slept on YMCA towels for a whole semester in university before my father found out and bought me a mattress. I felt really free because I was finally living on my own, but I was also really depressed because I had nothing.

Antoni Porowski

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

Ayelet Waldman

The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.

Barton Gellman

I was at Wesleyan first. I was there for a semester because I wanted that traditional college vibe. But when I got there, people would do normal college things, and I was like, 'I can't be here. This is a nightmare.'

Billie Lourd

I unloaded planes for UPS in Louisville, Kentucky. It only was bad because it was called 'Earn to Learn,' where you pay for your tuition for college, but you have to work graveyard shift - midnight to eight A.M. - and then go to school at nine or 10 A.M. I was a zombie after two semesters.

Boyd Holbrook

At most schools, if you switch majors, you basically start over. That means more semesters... and more money. The former might be appealing, but the latter is a major problem for a demographic already saddled with student debt.

Brian Shactman

I went to public high school in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I certainly wore a lot of makeup in high school. I experimented with a cat eye for a semester, and then, you know, a strong red lip because Courtney Love in Hole was all the rage.

Busy Philipps

Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

Caitlin Rose

I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.

Camryn Manheim

My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this: drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not.

Carl Hart

I was in college that first semester, and I was like, 'Wow, this isn't who I am. This isn't what I want to do.' I was like, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to go out and make something of myself, and I have no clue what that is.'

Channing Tatum

Yeah, there was the Flora Plum thing, where I trained for about a month and I had taken a semester off for that, and two weeks prior to filming, the financing collapsed.

Claire Danes

I would sign on for projects that were meant to shoot in July, and then they would postponed and they would bleed into the following semester, and then I'd take a semester off, and then the movie would collapse.

Claire Danes

From my first year on the faculty, there was always so much more I wanted to impart to the students. I decided that, rather than waste the last day of class summarizing the semester, I'd spend my time talking about what I'd learned in life that was useful.

Clayton M. Christensen

After my final semester at Yale in December of 2013, I made a scary choice. Instead of looking for work - feeling over-read and underweight - that for a few months I would go wherever the wind carried me. I would become a student of the world, and I would eat.

Clemantine Wamariya

My first semester, I got a D in creative writing.

Conrad Hall