Academics weren’t keeping his interest at Harvard either, Pierce explains.

“I came here knowing how to write a paper. As long as you turn in things and know what they are supposed to look like, you can’t get a bad grade in history classes,” he says. “I’ve never had a professor, a semester, or a course where I was like, ‘Wow!’”

Pierce got involved with BRYE his freshman year, even though he spent every other say of the week “goofing off,” but he says working with kids was “something I always did.”

“I was blowing off steam. It was fun,” he says. “It all comes back to not thinking studies were enough for me.”

Pierce was a summer school proctor after his sophomore year, but he dropped the one class he was taking and became disinterested and distant.

“I needed to get away. I shut myself off,” Pierce says. “I needed not to be in school.”

FINDING ANSWERS

A stroke of good luck found Pierce the answer to his disillusionment with college.

A friend of his parents’ was a pastor from Boston who had traveled to Morocco to be a pastor for an expatriate church there that catered to an international community.

Pierce’s parents told him that the pastor also worked for an orphanage in which one could work for room and board.

“They tossed it out in passing, kind of like a care,” Pierce says. “[I thought,] I’ve got to do this.”

And so he went. When Pierce describes Morocco, he can only summon up the adjectives “awesome” and “great.”

“From winters that don’t stop until the beginning of May to sun in February,” Pierce remembers. “Beautiful climate and countryside. The middle of nowhere. Mountains. Simple.”

His responsibilities at the orphanage were not time-intensive (“moving a pile of dirt with a wheelbarrow”), and Pierce says he spent a lot of time reading.

“It was nice to do something other than study,” Pierce says.