My Early College Experience: My High School Experience

My high school experience was different from most in the sense that I was enrolled in an early college program. This meant earning dual credit and graduating with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, and the chance to enroll at a four-year university as any typical high school student would. This also meant finding a new mode of transportation since the community college served as the high school campus and the only working car in the family was my father’s way to get to work. We met with the school principal on numerous occasions to discuss this issue and see what could be done, but it looked like this was going to be one opportunity I would be unable to take advantage of — I even missed the orientation week for incoming freshmen

This arrangement worked out swell for the first couple of years while I got accustomed to the new school system. However, even though we were given the option to concentrate on the arts or the sciences, there was a slight emphasis on aiming for STEM-based futures, and the elective arts classes available for early college students were more for writing and history than they were visual or performing arts; extracurriculars would be the only way for me to do something different. Nevertheless, my carpool buddies were involved in extracurricular activities that I was not a part of, and the ones that caught my interest happened to be on days they had no reason to stay after school. Driving myself was still financially out of the question, with no car and DACA not fitting into our budget. My family felt that my fellow students and their parents were already going out of their way enough to accommodate me, so I put extracurriculars out of mind for the time being and threw myself into my studies. During this time, the principal took the problem of transportation to a committee involved with the city, which implemented a bus that would make stops at frequent destinations in the area, including the school campus. Unfortunately, the route it ran was subject to change, and therefore unpredictable, not to mention it started running after some of my classes started and ended before my last class. This was a much appreciated and fantastic addition but it only provided a partial