Apple cofounder Steve Jobs grew up in the San Francisco area, and his parents wanted him to go to college nearby at either Stanford University or the University of California, Berkeley.
But according to Walter Isaacson's biography, he wanted something more "artistic" and insisted that if he could not go to Reed College, a liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, he would not go to college at all.
Reed's rigorous academic curriculum caused Jobs to drop out after six months, but a sympathetic dean allowed him to live on campus free of charge for another year and a half.
During his time at Reed in the early 70s, Jobs experimented with LSD, became a vegetarian, and immersed himself in Zen Buddhism, Isaacson writes.
Though he was no longer enrolled at the school, he audited courses he was interested in, including a calligraphy class that would famously influence his understanding of design and the products he would go on to create.
In a 1991 convocation speech at Reed, Jobs would say he learned more about generosity at the school than anywhere else in his life, and that the liberal arts requirements he once detested helped him "in everything I've ever done, although I wouldn't have guessed it at the time."