From the first day that a young Craig Griffing began attending school in his hometown of Picayune, Miss., he took his education seriously, heading into his bedroom to start his homework immediately after arriving home and not coming to dinner until he had finished. He never delayed starting any important paper and strove to always finish well before the deadline. Any time he made a bad grade he committed to studying harder and to ensuring he performed better the next time.
As the son of a radiologist father and public-school teacher mother, Griffing says he grew up in a family where the pursuit of higher education was an assumed fact of life for both his brother, Ward Griffing, and himself, which motivated his intense desire to succeed academically.
Griffing’s mother, Zoe McGovern Griffing, had worked as a teacher in New Orleans, La., since the 1950s but left her job after Griffing was born and became a stay-at-home mother. His father, Joseph Griffing, had started working as a radiologist at the now-closed Crosby Memorial Hospital in Picayune and later worked for Poplarville Hospital, Lumberton Hospital, Richton Hospital and the Biloxi V.A. Medical Center.
“I was never much of a partier and truly wanted to make something of myself growing up,” Griffing says. “My father wanted me to be the next doctor in the family, so that was the path I found myself on when I headed to Poplarville to enroll at Pearl River Community College.”
Pearl River Community College offers a number of career and technical-education programs such as the recently implemented Griffing Family Tech Scholarship. Photo by Gaven Wallace
Griffing received a diploma from the junior college in 1977 and went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1979. He later began his medical studies at Tulane University, and though he managed to graduate in 1983, Griffing ultimately concluded that the medical profession was not a good fit for him after all.
“To be honest, part of me felt from day one that I was in the wrong place in college, but