While attending the Juilliard School’s pre-college music division, Frances Halsband had an epiphany.

“I’m there in this artistic bubble and eventually realized I was not going to be a great pianist,” she says. “I felt isolated at Juilliard and decided I wanted to be more engaged in the real world.”

Halsband soon left the musician’s life and, in 1961, went off to Swarthmore College. There, she had another epiphany. It began with some impatience that students were just sitting around moaning about the war in Vietnam. She then noticed that her architecture-student friends at the University of Pennsylvania “never had time for suffering and angst.”

Read this full story on ENR.com.​