"...wrong?"

Just some observations: this is your code without the line numbers and my shebang:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use DBI

my $dsn = "jdbc:sybase:Tds:sample.college.com:29813:";
my $user     = "$ENV{'ESM_DBO'}";
my $password = "$ENV{'ESM_DBO_PASSWD'}";

my $dbh = DBI->connect( $dsn, $user, $password ) or die $DBI::errstr;

__END__
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This results in:

karls-mac-mini:playground karl$ perl -c ./kaputt.pl
"jdbc:sybase:Tds:sample.college.com:29813:" is not exported by the DBI
+ module
Can't continue after import errors at ./kaputt.pl line 8.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./kaputt.pl line 8.
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What perl sees is use DBI my $dsn = "jdbc:sybase:Tds:sample.college.com:29813:";

But i guess you meant: use DBI; my $dsn = "jdbc:sybase:Tds:sample.college.com:29813:";

Regards, Karl