조지아주립대학교[Georgia State University]
The Gap Decade/Joey Velazquez left Georgia State in 2000 with a grade point average under 1 point.
He worked in the movies and even sold a screenplay, but came back to pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer. He’ll graduate this year summa cum laude from the Honors College and will head to law school in the fall.
written by Ray Glier | photography by Carolyn Richardson | published on March 30, 2017
Joey Velazquez wanted to come back to college and you know what that means for most students looking for a do-over. A reckoning. Most students do not leave college early riding a wave of superb grades. They leave with a report card that is such a hot mess it can start a dumpster fire.
When Velazquez decided he wanted to come back to Georgia State after 13 years somebody should have warned the admissions office counselor to cover her eyes when she started searching for the younger Joey’s grade point average. Velazquez stood on the other side of the counter in Sparks Hall from the counselor as she called up his records from the 1999-2000 academic year. It was July 2013 and Velazquez was 32 years old.
She didn’t quite gasp when the screen with his GPA opened. It was more like “oh” and a slight recoil.
GPA 0.98.
She smiled. He smiled. There, they got the embarrassment out of the way.
“I remember I didn’t leave in good standing,” Velazquez said. “But I didn’t know it was that bad.
“I didn’t know if they would let me come back.”
Georgia State allowed him to come back, on probation, of course.
Joey Velazquez
Four years later Velazquez has a 3.88 GPA. He’s in the Honors College, he’s been on the Dean’s and President’s lists, he’s vice president of the pre-law club and president of mock trial. Velazquez worked in the state legislature for two years, one of those years as a senior aide to a powerful senator.
Velazquez was a 2016 nominee for the Truman Scholarship. He expects to add a couple of ‘A’ grades to his report card and take the GPA up to 3.9 and graduate summa cum laude by the time he finishes undergraduate work July 28. Next fall he’ll be starting his first semester of law school.
“I owe this school a lot,” Velazquez said.
They say some high school students need a gap year to figure out what they really want to do, or at least a year to mature so they can handle college. How about a gap decade?
Velazquez, who was 17 when he first enrolled at Georgia State in 1998, dragged that 0.98 around like a ball-and-chain, but he had other things on his mind. Velazquez, like a lot of other kids, just had other ambitions, like film work, and his mind drifted off in classes as a 17-year-old.
So after he dropped out of Georgia State, Velazquez went to the New York Film Academy for a 10-week course in film study. Then he went to Los Angeles for six years, including two years in the Film Immersion Program and Feature Film Development Program. He also spent a year in South Korea teaching English and writing.
