There were good things in my life I had loyal friends and some teachers who really believed in me. I was more stubborn than anything else, and I returned for my senior year, if only to prove that teacher wrong. In fact, I had fallen so far from academic grace that my physics teacher wrote on my end-of-term report card that if I didn't undergo a radical 'personality shift,' I'd fail to reach my potential in life. I scraped through my first year with a demoralizing C average, crushing my father's dreams of ordering 'Second-Generation Ivy League' T-shirts. It was only a matter of days before I realized I was out of my depth, and the more I tried to paddle to the top, the deeper I sank. A lot of them were even good at gym, which seemed genuinely unfair. That was kind of the point of the school. But Science and Math was full of smart kids.

I ranked fourth in my class at my first high school (no amount of studying can help a fat kid ace gym).

Prior to my junior year, every shred of my self-confidence was tied to being smart. Boarding school gave me an unforgettable education and friends I will have until the day I die, but it was also the hardest two years of my life - and I almost didn't survive. In a recent conversation with Green, he quoted a friend who told him, 'Boarding school gave me the best years of my life, and a lot of other things, too.' That aptly summed up my experience at Science and Math.

Not only was I convinced that Science and Math would be my ticket out of the suburban South, but I truly believed there could be nothing more fun than living at school.ĭiscover your new favorite show: Watch This Now! For me, it was the North Carolina School of Science and Math, a public residential school in Durham, North Carolina, just a stone's throw away from Duke University campus. For Alaska's adventure-seeking teens, it was Culver Creek Preparatory Academy. You see, like Green himself and the teenagers at the center of his book, I left home at 16, seeking my 'great perhaps' at a boarding school for gifted students. And bitterness it had long been my dream to bring Looking for Alaska to life myself. Fear that the book might not be adapted faithfully. Excitement, because Looking for Alaska is by far my favorite of Green's novels.

I had a lot of feelings when Hulu announced that Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage would be adapting John Green's debut novel, Looking for Alaska, into an eight-episode miniseries.

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