Shellfish College is Nick Milano's story. It traces his passage through college and all the weird, annoying, laughable, enriching, stupid, exasperating, rewarding, childish, irritating, romantic challenges that worked to create the man not even he would have believed lived underneath his Sicilian hide. That was one aspect of Nick's maturing process. The other, more frightening matter he faced was dealing with his mother, Sophia. She was an immigrant from the "Old Country" and didn't understand her son's desire to attend the United States Air Force Academy and become a fighter pilot--one of Uncle Sam's human bullets. 'Nicholas, why do you need to travel 700 miles an hour to break the sound barrier thing. Couldn't you just grab a sledge hammer and whack it?' If Milano had been writing his story, he never would have attended Shellfish College in the first place. Transitioning from a male-only high school of 6,000 boys to a college of less than 200 students was not how he saw his life progressing, especially not a college with a ridiculous twelve-foot, orange lobster mascot named Lobbie whose image he'd wear on his soccer jersey and baseball uniform.