sumstudent-blog1

[sumstudent-blog1]

Life Transitions, Part 1

The following is an excerpt from my blog (I don't think I can post the link), if you're interested in reading more things like this, let me know. I'm writing to the person I was in high school all those years ago, now as a senior Chemical Engineer at UC Berkeley. I guess I have felt the full spectrum of school settings given the path I took in my education, so I feel able to comment on the transition one would expect after moving into the next jungle of academia. This post will focus mainly on the high school to junior college experience. I’ll talk about the junior college to university transition next (probably). I’ll briefly sum up my transition from high school to junior college by saying it was tougher than I thought. In high school, I was one of the kids who was in all the AP classes. You saw the same kids in AP Biology as you saw in AP Spanish and Physics, so you became familiar with your schoolmates over the years. I wasn’t the most social of high schoolers, I only had a few close friends, never went to parties (or prom…sad, I know), so I didn’t really have to go through the pain of losing too many close friendships after I started at SRJC. We stayed in touch on Facebook and met during the occasional spring break or whatever, but starting anew really means starting a new life, making new friends, etc. What surprised me the most when I started at a junior college (SRJC) was the difference in students relative to high school. In high school, we were all the same age, lived in the same area, had similar interests (why else would you take AP Biology if you didn’t like science?), and (I may seem like a jerk here) I felt like we all had a spark. By that I mean all my classmates were going places, they were on a tight schedule because they were moving to Colorado or New York or whatever for their dream school so they could pursue their respective passions. At SRJC, the student body was a lot different. The demographics are much more diverse. I was the baby of the class in Calculus II (at age 18), I felt like the average age was about 30 with a standard deviation of 10. It wasn’t uncommon to see a 40-year-old is what I’m trying to say statistically. Being the youngest in a group can be intimidating (it doesn’t help that I’m short too), so I had a hard time making connections with people when I started. The hardest part for me was a sense of stagnation. I (this is the jerk part), felt like the 30 and 40-year-olds were going nowhere. I respect them immensely as I know how hard it can be to get back into school after working. But as a freshly minted high school grad, whose friends had all just gone off to their dream universities and was used to this environment in which ambition was abundant, was in for a shock. My older classmates were people who dropped out of high school or finished high school but didn’t want to go straight to college. I really wanted to go to UC Berkeley, “Berkeley or Bust” was my motto, and I could strongly feel the difference in enthusiasm for school between me and my AP (advanced placement) classmates and the average student at SRJC. I should back up my feelings here with some statistics. According to Teacher’s College at Columbia, while 81% of incoming junior college students say they want to transfer to a 4-year university, only 33% actually transfer within 6 years. Life at a junior college is tough, I can personally attest to this claim. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit and drop out and just work and live my life. It is so easy to give up, I would argue even more so than many universities in which they have fancy counseling services and programs to keep their students enrolled and on track to graduate. While the quality of the student body at a junior college may be considered less than that of a high school (I neither agree nor disagree with this assessment as every college and high school is different), I will argue that the relative quality of teachers improved greatly. High school teachers can teach a subject with only a bachelor’s degree, whereas a junior college or college professor can only teach a subject if they have a Master’s or Doctorate. A college professor will (on average) know a lot more about a topic than a high school teacher, and if you’re passionate about the subject, you can dive a lot deeper into stuff you care about. You can have a lot more interesting conversations about something you like in junior college with your teacher than you did in high school. SRJC and most junior colleges, are commuter schools: most students drive many miles to get there. Out were the days of a 5-minute drive to high school, in were the days of two-hour commutes and fighting for parking and worrying about your car breaking down on the day of the final. Commuting was a new, and quite stressful, experience for me. You never really get good at it, just used to it. The next major change was class size, in my high school honors chemistry class we had about 15 students, the class size of general chemistry at SRJC was about 60, which is quite small compared to university settings. That isn’t to say the days of individual attention were gone, the professors at a junior college and many state schools are very accessible and (on average) friendlier than a university professor, so it is an easier transition than going straight into university out of high school. Get used to spending a lot more time on campus. Out were the days when high school classes were nicely packaged and organized so you could finish everything by 2 and have a nice set time for lunch and break, in were the days of having Linear Algebra at 7:30am for 2 hours, Organic Chemistry at 11am for an hour, Organic Chemistry Lab at 2pm for 3 hours, then commute back home for 1 hour in traffic. Making use of your time between classes is critical, you won’t make it in college if you can’t force yourself to block out the noise and focus hard on something for a few hours at a moment’s notice. For me, the best place I could do that was at the library. I’d turn off my phone, make a list of my goals I needed to get done within the next 2 hours, prioritize the list, and start working. At the junior college, registering for classes was tough (the demand for classes was so high). For example, I damn near didn’t get into my Organic Chemistry class because there were 60 seats and a lot of people wanted the class. We had 14 people standing as they crashed the course on the first day, only 4 of them made it in. Registering for and actually getting classes at a JC is very stressful, and I feel the stigmas associated with people who spend years in a JC are unfounded as luck plays a big role in whether you get a class or not. I could have very well needed to spend an additional year if I didn’t make it into my OChem class, and I got one of the last available seats because of how the priority system worked. I’ll end by saying you need to have something in life that isn’t school. For me, it was going on a bike ride every day. If I didn’t have that, I’d be clinically insane. There needs to be more to your life than school and work. Think of all the things you’d do if you weren’t in school and do them, or do something that makes you feel happy. This is the stress of college, this is what makes people drop out. It can feel like you’re drowning if you never surface (get outside and do something you love).