NARRATOR: Welcome to the Towson University College of Fine Arts and Communications "What's Your Story" podcast. In today's story, we hear from Dr. Timothy Chandler, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs. He tells us how he learned to adapt to new environments at a young age. 

TIMOTHY CHANDLER: One of the dramatic turning points in my life was as an eight-year-old being sent away to boarding school in England. It's not an abnormal thing to happen, but it was pretty jarring as a sudden change from living in a warm family home to living in a fairly cold dormitory environment in an all boys school. And I had to learn to both fit in, and at the same time, try to stand out because you wanted to be more than just one of the crowd. 

Sport was one of the ways in which you did that if you were a fairly lazy academic student as I was. But one of the most telling things for me was that while I wasn't particularly happy, I realized, in that I slept in a bed next to another 8-year-old who was the son of a British Navy captain, that he cried himself to sleep every night. And at lunchtime every day he would walk to the end of the school driveway in the belief that his parents couldn't possibly want to leave him there being that miserable. 

And he waited for them to come and pick him up every day. It made me realize that while I was unhappy, I certainly wasn't that unhappy, and that you can adapt if you need to, and learn both to fit in and to stand out and get pleasure in doing both of those two things. But it was a very jarring experience and something that I think I've carried with me. Certainly my wife told me I was emotionally crippled for a very long time and that she's done a wonderful job of rehabilitating me.