When classes began in 1945, the first week of October, Andy Warhol and I were among the 60 freshmen enrolled in painting and design at Carnegie Tech. The majority of the group was female. World War II had ended just the month before; only four of the handful of males were veterans.

Andy was easy to overlook in such a crowd, for at 5-foot-9 and weighing just 135 pounds, he lacked a prominent presence. To those of us who came to know him, Andy was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, naive introvert. I never heard him shout, never saw him in a fit of rage. He often seemed awkward, timid, vulnerable and nonverbal, and his pale skin gave him a gaunt appearance.

At Schenley High School, Andy sometimes had been the only student wearing a white shirt and tie; at Carnegie Tech he quickly adopted the garb of the art students; a well-worn tan corduroy sports coat over a navy blue turtleneck sweater and paint-splattered jeans. Brown-and-white saddle shoes were popular, and his were unique; painted black over the areas that originally were white.

During his freshman year, 15 of the 30 hours of class each semester were devoted to Drawing I, which focused on "analytical observation and the means of expressing volume, spatial position, illumination and texture." It should have been a trouble-free experience, except that Andy had had virtually no exposure to the medium of charcoal or to applying the principles of perspective, two of the mainstays of the course.

The class was taught by Roy Hilton, a man with impeccable manners and taste in clothes. We called him Mr. Tweed because of his three-piece suits, and assumed he was British; he was actually from Boston. A week into the semester we were asked to draw our first nude model, a shocking and embarrassing experience for many of the freshmen who had never been exposed to a naked female body. Andy's face grew paler than usual, and a coed whose easel was beside his thought he was about to faint.

One of the first assignments for a large charcoal drawing was a still-life composition of a stool and an easel with a drawing board leaning against it. Andy thought more in terms of outlines than tones, and he found it difficult to master a light touch with the charcoal necessary for the subtle shades of gray between black and white. Hilton's admonition was, "Don't put lights in the dark areas and darks in the light." Andy found the necessary discipline a constant struggle.

But it was perspective that became the bane of his freshman year. He did not subscribe to the class motto, "If it's tiltin', see Hilton," preferring instead to enlist the aid of his classmates.

I recall responding in front of a stairway on the ground floor of the Fine Arts Building; "Look how you can see more of each step below eye level, and how the treads disappear above the eye level." He saw itbut couldn't do it.

Andy also experienced difficulty with the course in color, which dealt with the elements of hue, value and intensity, and how to control and manipulate them. It was taught by the department chairman, Wilfred Allen Readio, a faculty member since 1921, whose crewcut gave him the aspect of a sergeant to 17-year-olds like Andy and me.

Readio enjoyed toying with the class in order to make a point, as he did in assigning us to look at a sunset and paint it (no easy task, given the soot-laden skies over Pittsburgh). When our handiwork was tacked up on the wall the following week, Andy's was wrong -- and so was everyone else's! There was no problem with the blended transition from yellow to orange, red, green, blue and purple; we had simply failed to darken the value of the hues as they ascended from the horizon.

Large Munsell Color Charts were mounted permanently on the wall, and during the semester we were expected to match particular color chips with tempera paint, create optical illusions and experiment with the five categories of color harmony. All of this presented problems for Andy.

The second term of our freshman year became extremely competitive; the rat race was brought on by the department chairman's startling announcement that some 300 war veterans had applied for admission to the department, and though the school had never enrolled a midyear class, it had decided to do so now. Fifteen of that number would begin in a special section and continue through the summer, then be absorbed into our class in the fall, when we would start our sophomore year together. In order to accommodate the veterans, the low 15 from among us would be dropped at the end of the semester.

Three years before Andy entered Carnegie Tech, the department had introduced a new group of required courses -- Thought and Expression, History of the Arts and Civilization, Individual Psychology, and Social Orientation -- intended to broaden the general education of art students. The freshman requirement was Thought and Expression, calculated to develop what the catalog called "intellectual curiosity and effective expression through contact with varied experiences including a wide range of reading -- and appreciation and interpretation of literature, especially modern; and in oral and written compassion."

The instructor was Gladys Schmitt, a well-known author and native Pittsburgher, and while Andy was intrigued by the course, writing was not his forte. An even greater challenge for him was the requirement to stand before the class and express his thoughts, for invariably he would utter a few sentences and then freeze, unable to continue. It was a painful experience for all of us.

Each student's semester grades in art were determined by the faculty in a process referred to as "judgment." For this procedure, all student works were arranged by last names in alphabetical order on a wall that ran the entire length of the building. A long bench mounted on casters provided room for six of the nine instructors, including the department chairman, some elder statesmen and the lone female.

When the faculty arrived at the end of the wall, in front of Andy's art, a young teacher declared, "He's not going to fit," at which point Russell Hyde responded, "You can't do this. You're wrong. I want you to give this kid another chance. Let him go and finish the summer with the class of veterans." And Samuel Rosenberg, like Hyde a senior faculty member, also came to Andy's defense.

Rosenberg, who had not yet taught him, happened into the drawing studio just as Andy, in tears, was cleaning out his locker. Rosenberg asked what was wrong and when Andy explained that he had flunked out, the professor advised him to go to summer school, get credits for Drawing I, and he would be readmitted.

On May 29, Andy received his report card. The grades were C's and D's, plus an R(repeat) in Thought and Expression. Accompanying it was the notation "Suspended until advancement in Drawing I." Andy took Rosenberg's advice and enrolled in the summer-school class which was, coincidentally, taught by Russell Hyde.

Some of the classwork involved drawing field trips to Oakland, like the time the students went to Forbes Field, where a circus was being set up. Then one day Hyde told Andy, "You must quit drawing the things that you think I want. You have got to do things the way you want them, and be damned with what I think, be damned with what anybody else around you thinks. Go do it the way you see it, to please yourself, or you'll never amount to anything." He also advised Andy to carry a sketchpad at all times, and to draw the life around him. This pep talk was a turning point in Andy's education and his career in art.

This article is excerpted from "The Education of Andy Warhol," which Bennard B. Perlman, a Baltimore artist and writer, wrote for the catalog of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. which opens next weekend.