Finding Your Purpose: Our Story
At 17 years old, you don’t know your life’s purpose much less where you want to go to college or what to study. Growing up in Chicago, I was surrounded by top universities. What prompted me to go to college in small town Minnesota baffles me to this day. I don’t like cold and a small town at that time wasn’t for me. Although it was a good experience and met life long friends, I wanted a city life where there was action.
My parents prompted a change to transfer to Georgia Tech in downtown Atlanta to study engineering. The coordinator for new students gave the age old speech, “look to your left, look to your right, those faces will not be there after a year.” That proved to be a reality for my roommates. With the motto “To be the best,” on our door, I was determined not to be a statistic.
Signing up for courses in the Electrical Engineering college was daunting. We had key punch cards to exchange for classes. Yes, key punch cards, a stiff piece of paper representing digital data. A big auditorium with tables set up for the various departments where you manually solicited your schedule until your stack of cards could be processed by the computer. I was overwhelmed and lamented over leaving my small town, safe college experience in Minnesota. But after a long day of negotiating, I had a full load of classes.
My first year was stressful beyond measure. I was always a good math student, but here I hit rock bottom. Math just came naturally to me, but not anymore. My electrical engineering classes where weed out classes…they wanted us to fail. In the computer age where everyone wanted to build computers, including me, they needed only the cream of the crop. I wasn’t it.
Struggling with classes, stressed beyond my capacity, I felt like a dazed and confused child starring at a sea of formulas. My parents said, “Change majors, don’t do what you hate, life is too short.” Enduring the ridicule from my peers who called industrial engineers, imaginary engineers, I reluctantly dropped out of my major and transferred in to the Industrial and Systems Engineering college at Georgia Tech. I looked at my options for the quickest way to escape the hell I was experiencing. I was determined to graduate so a Management Science fit the bill. I loved it.
As I was finishing up my senior year, interviewing for my next step in life, I had to complete a course in “Measurement Theory.” Simple enough if you attended class, but the lecture fell into a prime interview time which was my priority. After missing several sessions, I was desperate to get what tech called “word” or old tests. As I entered the library, I noticed an unfamiliar face, but a student who had the prized “word” for tomorrow’s test. I introduced myself asking if I could study with him. Tom, my new study buddy, agreed and gave me the information for the test which I aced.
Our first encounter, however, wasn’t that smooth. Tom asked if he could get a ride back to his car on the opposite side of campus. Parking was a challenge at tech. I agreed, unknowing that I left my lights on causing my car’s battery to die. After hours of pushing the car and getting jumper cables, we got to know each other.
Tom grew up in Cleveland. He never was a good student, but was an excellent athlete. Skied in Europe with the US ski team and excelled in football which landed him at Dennison University. After his first degree, he enrolled at Montana State in engineering. Hunting, fishing and hiking in beautiful Montana was a dream if he was retired. Determined to get into the rat race, he applied to Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, but got accepted at neither. Although he would be a fourth generation Virginia Tech grad, he was thinking city life was meant for him and talked his way into the engineering program at Georgia Tech. He vowed, however, to return to Montana when he retired. He had a vision for his life which I soon became a part of. Little did we know that our destiny was already in the stars.
After graduation and a couple of years of courting, we moved to Boston where we were married. Three kids later and 11 moves, we settled in a suburb outside of Cincinnati, Ohio to raise our children. As a family, we believe to live up to your full potential you needed to live intentionally “To Be the Best” as stated on my college dorm door. Annually, we would write down our goals and life priorities. I wanted to become the top luxury real estate agent in my office. Tom wanted to buy that dream home in Montana. We had our bucket list and was even scheduled to visit Galapagos that fall.
Until the overwhelming life events that occurred in 2015, we thought we had the perfect life with big city living and keeping up with the metaphorical Jones. But my father in-law died in January. Then my mom suddenly died in April, just weeks before her two grandchildren, our boys, were graduating from college. On a tearful Mother’s Day, my mom’s favorite day, we watched our son receive his diploma. The next weekend, we watched our other son receive his engineering degree. He was the fourth generation to graduate from Virginia Tech, but his grandpa was now missing the heartfelt moment. Our son proudly wore his grandpa’s Virginia Tech’s class ring with the Hoge family crest for the occasion. The surge of raw emotions as we were surrounded by the university steeped in tradition, left us in tears.
But our current bucket list did not seem to matter anymore or our fast paced lifestyle. We seriously re-evaluated where we would want to live as well as how we would go about living. After all our moves around the country over our married life, we looked for a place to establish our roots, to find our forever home. With our parents now gone and our boys on their own, we were at a crossroads in life. We could continue with our picture perfect setting or venture, intentionally, into something new, the unknown. Although we began our search in Montana, what seemed almost illogical to most, we decided to buy a farm, in Virginia. Goodbye city life.
A property initially found by my sister-in-law, a desolate and abandoned family farm, intrigued us. Historic Belle-Hampton had been in my husband’s family for 250 years. Perilously close to being lost for future generations, we saved it in the nick of time. It was a week before it was put on the open real estate market when we made our offer. Although we thought we would move out to Montana, the property had everything we wanted, land, water, nature and something more, family history. We now had our roots.
When we reflected on what led us to our destination, we realized the historic structures we purchased were surreally frozen in time. Vacated over 100 years earlier, apparently waiting for us to arrive. If I didn’t fail at electrical engineering, I would never have taken the Measurement Theory class. Or if Tom was accepted at Virginia Tech, we would never have met at the Georgia Tech library 30 plus years earlier. Now, the ancestral history and a future family legacy came together. We found our purpose. Coincidence? I think not. Do you believe you have a purpose not yet fulfilled?
FREE eBook: Individual Purpose Statement
