he gained a reputation of being a timid boy who wrote humorous poems and drew humorous comic strips. Serious and little interested in athletic activities, he was called El Viejo by his classmates. García Márquez spent his first years of high school, from 1940, in the Colegio jesuita San José (today Instituto San José), where he published his first poems in the school magazine Juventud. Later, thanks to a scholarship given to him by the government, Gabriel was sent to study in Bogotá, then was relocated to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a town one hour away from the capital, where he would finish his secondary studies. During his time at the Bogotá study house, he excelled in various sports, becoming team captain of the Liceo Nacional Zipaquirá team in three disciplines: soccer, baseball, and track. After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, but spent most of his spare time reading fiction. La metamorfosis by Franz Kafka, at the time incorrectly thought to have been translated by Jorge Luis Borges, was a work that especially inspired him. He was excited by the idea of writing, not traditional literature, but in a style similar to his grandmother's stories, in which she "inserted extraordinary events and anomalies as if they were simply an aspect of everyday life." His desire to be a writer grew. A little later he published his first work, "La tercera resignación," which appeared in the 13 September 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador. Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the Bogotazo riots on 9 April following the assassination of popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned. García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal. In 1950 he ended his legal studies to focus on journalism and moved again to Barranquilla to work as a columnist and reporter in the newspaper El Heraldo. Though García Márquez never finished his higher studies, some universities, including Columbia University in the City of New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing. Journalism García Márquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the National University of Colombia. In 1948 and 1949 he wrote for El Universal in Cartagena.