'The Best and Worst of Both Worlds'

Then, in 2003, he got laid off. And he looked at the engineers and the other bosses on site, and noticed that they never lost their jobs.

So he decided to go back to school at nearby Garrett College. He did well -- so well that, with a 3.8 grade-point average, he was offered a full ride to Bucknell.

"It was the best and the worst of both worlds," he said. He was thrilled to go to a school far better than anything he had ever imagined. And he was terrified at what it might do to his family.

He put it off for a year, trying to talk his wife into moving. She has a full-time job at Early Head Start and is busy with their church, and their families live nearby. "I'm not one for change," Tammy Tichinel said. "This is my home."

A Wave of Pressure

A year ago, Dan Tichinel started a summer program at Bucknell designed for transfers such as him. Right away he could tell how different it would be: Not only does the campus have the patina of an Ivy League school, with old brick buildings and paths winding along lush lawns, but the professors had far higher expectations of students, with much more difficult assignments. And although he had always excelled at Garrett, "here I'm not at the top anymore," he said. "There are a lot of smart kids here. A lot."

The friendly, talkative guy who was always ready to laugh at himself got stressed out. He worked so hard to get A's that he had panic attacks during tests, second-guessing his answers at times. "The professor even seen it on the paper and wrote, 'Why did you erase this?' It cost me an A, both times.

"It's definitely not something that I would encourage people to do -- have four kids and try to go back to school."

The fall was tough. At Garrett, he didn't think twice about asking a professor for help. At Bucknell, it was harder, with busy faculty members. He would say to the other students, "Man, I'm dumb!"

The year he took off hurt him in his Calculus 3 class, he said -- he kept having to review Calc 2 before doing the homework, because he had forgotten so much. Or maybe it was because the math class he took at Garrett wasn't as demanding. "It was a nightmare."

He was smoking more, and he kept telling himself he should get to the gym. But there was never enough time. The stress and the loneliness were making it harder to concentrate, too. He was isolated; it was hard to imagine breaking into the close-knit groups of friends most sophomores had, or going out drinking with 19-year-olds.

And he was still going home every weekend to see his family.

At times, the thought would flash into his mind: He could just quit. Go home for good, leave the pressure behind. Driving home after the finals in December, he said, "Oh man, I must have studied for a solid week for 12 hours a day, and I just stunk 'em up something terrible. I did really bad on them."