Bryan Garcia has an ear for Linkin Park and the Black Eyed Peas, feet for dancing salsa, a guilty pleasure in sitcoms, a love of soccer and a habit of slicking back his dark brown hair.

But something sets this 21-year-old apart from the typical college student: He's studying to be a Roman Catholic priest.

Garcia is one of 74 men at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Westchester. While the church nationally is coping with a shortage of priests, you wouldn't know it from St. Vianney, which is experiencing its largest enrollment in 3 ½ decades.

The students are walking the road to a job that takes longer to prepare for than a medical degree, pays less than a janitor's wage and demands a lifetime without sex.

``People think we're these perfect, pious people,'' says Garcia. ``We're normal guys.''

There's the 33-year-old former Air Force pilot from Tampa who, while flying dozens of high-pressure missions to Iraq and Afghanistan, found solace in his faith. Already a college graduate, he will study two years before joining an advanced seminary in Boynton Beach and aims to be a military chaplain.

There's the 23-year-old from Boca Raton, a neuroscience graduate from the University of Miami who opted to skip medical school and follow in the footsteps of his Vietnamese father, a former seminarian who was jailed for his faith before fleeing during the Vietnam War.

And there are men like Garcia. An altar boy since he was 10, Garcia was raised among nuns and priests in Catholic schools, and his teenage years brought a recurring feeling of being drawn to the religious life. He always pulled back, enrolling in a secular college only to transfer out. He's among peers: Young men in their 20s with little job or college experience beyond seminary make up the majority of students.

They show their age as they jostle and tease each other while packing the dorm's recreation rooms, where pool and foosball are popular. On Fridays, they get together for soccer, and each month the college sponsors a trip to a museum or a concert.

Twenty minutes from the sand and skin of South Beach, St. John Vianney is a world of its own. Photos of popes and bishops line hallways, while statues of Jesus and Mary accent the grounds and Biblically-themed paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt hang among a half-dozen classrooms.

``What they want most is help in knowing the Lord,'' says the Rev. Michael Carruthers, who oversees the men. ``If that leads to the priesthood, great.

These are undeniably challenging times for men chosen by the church to tend the flock. Only 42 percent of American Catholics attend weekly services. People are still recovering from the sting of sexual-abuse revelations over the past decade. More recently, the economy has forced the Archdiocese of Miami to close 13 churches and seven schools.

DAY BY DAY

Each morning at this school named after a 19th-century French priest, Garcia awakens before dawn -- at times to an iPod blasting Christian rock -- in a place that, beyond its cookie-cut furniture, bears little resemblance to the typical dorm.

On his bed's backboard hangs a cross. A snapshot of Pope John Paul II is taped to his wardrobe. Handwritten Bible passages are scattered on a desk. Across the hall, a priest-professor lives in a suite, and a few steps away, next to a statue of a saint, is a small prayer room.