My Future Path - College, Work & Real Life

Me and me neighbor are always doing something and talking. It’s a terrbile habit we have. So one day, we’re online looking at colleges we’re interested in and a thought pops into our heads.
Why do we need this?
High school…why?
I am not going to use a polynomial function anywhere in the near future. Or what a mole is (in chemistry terms). What’s the point?
Why aren’t they helping us learn how to balance a check, save and invest money?
I plan on doing everything but engineering and becoming a math teacher in my career, so why exactly do I need to know what numbers are in pie?
The interesting thing is, I’d ask one of teachers, “Do we really need to know this?”
And they say, “Maybe, if you want to become this…or this, but not really.”

We’re saying this now, but in college will we still be saying this? In honesty I think college is a lot more helpful because you rely on yourself more. I hope I won’t be saying that exact thing as soon as I hit college.
Can’t wait till that happenes.

Meanwhile I’ll still be asking myself, “Why are we still here in high school!?”

Community colleges tend to have a certain stigma associated with them: they’re not good schools, nobody who’s anybody goes to them, essentially, they’re a joke. Many of the people who graduate from my high school go to the local community college, Cabrillo College, which has been coloquially dubbed “Cabrehab.” I’ve heard students say that they feel like Cabrillo isn’t “real school.” The biggest problem with this kind of thinking is that, if someone feels like they are not attending real school, they won’t work  real hard, and what I’ve noticed is that sometimes, my community college friends work harder than I do at a private school.

Community colleges have so many qualities that make them perfect for some people: they’re local, so students can live at home and commute, they’re cheaper than most 4-year universities, and they’re flexible. Community colleges understand that their students may want to transfer, so they let you know exactly what you have to do to get the most out of your community college education and then transfer to another university. And that’s where it gets hard. My friends in community college have more general education requirements than I do because their school specializes in provided such a wide range of academics, whereas mine is more focused in particular areas of study. Also, because many of my friends are looking to transfer, they have to work their butts off to get the credits they need to do that as soon as possible. It’s hard! And I admire them so much for doing what it takes.

But not all people realize just how much work community college can be. If they see their school as a joke, they will treat it as such. People may think that they’ll really start working once they transfer to a four-year school, so they slack off in community college. What they don’t realize is that they only way the can transfer in the time they’d like is to pay attention, ask questions, and create a plan for acheiving their dreams. This can’t happen if they’re slacking.

My advice for those of you looking into community college is to take it seriously. It is real school. Maybe you’d like to spend four years at a community college, maybe just two and then transfer. Either way, it will only be worth it if you get as much as you can out of the experience. (That goes true for any other school in the country.) And if you think only “nobodys” go to community college, take a look at these people who did (provided by collegeboard.com)

• Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer prize-winning poet
• Eileen Collins, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut
• Joyce Luther Kennard, California Supreme Court justice
• Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former United Nations (UN) ambassador
• Jim Lehrer, news anchor
• Robert Moses, choreographer and dance company founder
• Sam Shepard, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright
• James Sinegal, CEO of Costco
• Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

If they can do it, so can you!

“I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.” - Jim Carrey

I’m going to take a moment to break with tradition (or at least, the tradition I’ve followed for the past few weeks) and not write about college myths. As I was browsing the TeenInk site today, I noticed TeenInk Raw, the unedited version of the regular website, and it got me thinking. I think it’s safe to assume that all students entering college wonder how it’s going to be different from high school. Of course, most people first think of the difficulty of classes and the big change in living situations. And yes, these are undoubtedly major differences. I’d like to discuss another one, though; something that I particularly noticed as being a difference between high school and college, and that is content.

As TeenInk Raw stands testament to, teenagers are brimming with ideas that cannot and should not always be edited for the general public or younger audiences. High school is edited. College is not. High school students certainly talked to each other about “unedited” subjects, like drugs and sex, and in an “unedited” vernacular language involving many of the words discussed by the late great George Carlin. However, a high school teacher would probably not talk to their students about unedited subjects in an unedited language. But a college professor would.

In a single year of college courses, I think every single one of my professors used “the F word” at least once, and one of my required reading book was called “The History of Shit” (an pretty interesting read, should you feel up to it.) My professors were also perfectly fine with discussing drugs or sex, including their students’ personal habits in both areas. As one professor put it “We’re all adults here.” He was right. In college, you are an adult, as are your professors, so the age difference doesn’t matter as much. In high school, I had many teachers whom I felt like I could speak with as equals. I respected them, they respected me, no problem. In which case, I never felt like there was a distinct student/teacher authority line that was shattered upon reaching college. No, nothing that dramatic. But the difference was still noticeable.

As always, words of wisdom: “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.” - Clare Booth Luce

College is all about work OR college is all about fun

Alright, yes, this myth is technically two myths, and myths that are exact opposites as well. However, I think the debunking of each of these common beliefs about college is the same for both.

Now, I’m sure you have all heard the long-winded saying about school in general that is often favored by many a sharp-tongued cynic: You go to elementary school to prepare you for middle school, and what you learn in middle school is supposed to prepare you for high school, and you’re supposed to do well in high school so you can go to a good college, and you want to go to a good college so you can get a good job, and you want to get a good job so you can make a lot of money, because money = happiness. So if we’re talking about college, then we can say the purpose of college is to get a job. Well, yes…technically…but not quite.

Yes, you should always do your best in whatever you do, but not necessarily so you can make it to the next phase of your life. Yes, you should work hard in high school because your performance in high school affects your options for whatever comes after high school. But high school is not about getting into college. This is something that I didn’t really understand until after I had graduated, and I found myself wishing I had done more things that I wanted to do, rather than all the things I did simply because they looked good on a college application. High school should be about learning (as should college), but true education cannot come solely from a classroom; it comes from experience.

My point is that education is not as simple as “do X to get to Y to get to Z.” Education is what you make of it. Yes, you are limited in your course of study while you are in high school because high school curriculum is fairly standardized, but this is less so in college. You have a wider range of courses to choose from, and fewer conditions to meet. Even so, the things you learn in college should not all come from your professors. As I said before, learning comes from experience. So while reviewing your notes from today physics lecture may be quite educational, you may learn more from a conversation with your next door neighbor. College cannot be all about work.

Similarly, and yet completely opposite, college cannot be all about fun. Work hard, play hard, my friends. Yes, you will meet lots of people and make new friends, and yes, you will have the freedom to do essentially whatever you want, and yes, chances are you will have fewer classes early in the morning which means you can afford to stay up until 3 because you can sleep until 10 BUT…pace yourself. To quote my mother quoting a zillion Zen books: “Everything in moderation.”

Your college experience should be enjoyable, but that doesn’t mean it should be four years of parties 24/7 like many an exaggerated tale and episode of Greek could lead you to believe. School is hard work; it’s just that simple. You will spend just as many nights up until 3 in the morning writing a paper as you will partying with your friends, if not more (I hope.)

Striking a happy medium can be difficult, and believe it or not, sometimes it’s harder to go out and have fun with people than it is to stay at home and study. In fact, nearly all of my friends who just finished their freshman year of college have said more about the difficulty of typically “fun” things, like meeting new people, than about the difficulty of their classes. But more on that later. For now, as always, some words of wisdom:

“A child only educated in school is an uneducated one.” – George Bernard Shaw