Jan. 2018 The College Drop Out
I was a college drop out. At the age of nineteen, in an epiphany of infinite wisdom, I walked off the Community College of Baltimore County’s Essex campus. I was going to work as a medical secretary for a hot, young vascular surgeon. I was bypassing school. I didn’t think going to school to be a writer seemed realistic anymore. My family in the fire department thought I should give up being “artsy-fartsy” and go be a nurse. They were just glad I didn’t go to that art school to be an actress, even if it broke my mother’s heart to see me turn it down. All my other friends were going to spend hours in the drudgery of lecture halls and study groups, but with my $13 an hour, I was going to get ahead. “When I have an apartment in the city, I’ll take some night classes”, I thought. I didn’t know at that moment that the next time I sat in a classroom would be 13 years later and 500 miles away. Nor was I aware of the fact that I would occupy a comedic amount of jobs during that time. Not until I was 32 would I realize that if I would have stayed in school, I may have concluded much earlier that my real passion would be expression and communicating. Now, I am certain that my life experiences, scope of occupations, and honed skills in
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Over the course of the next 2 years, we tried our best to balance her therapies and extra care, with our demanding careers. It wasn’t working. I was on the edge of a serious breakdown. Last summer, after the death of one of my closest relatives, I took a vacation, wrote a little, and literally cried on Chris’s shoulder. We decided that I had to quit my job. The high stress of work mixed with the intensity of Cecilia’s condition were too much for me to handle emotionally, mentally, and physically. I returned to work, put in my notice, and drove to Brunswick Community
One of her children, Jonathan, died at a young age to due a heart defect. Because of this, she has faced a lot of grief. “If one of us is down, the other helps us up,” Chris explained on how she overcomes some of her challenges. Having close friends and family also helps her combat difficulties. It is also extremely helpful for her to have people still value and remember Jonathan’s life. Chris is also an extremely optimistic person. She says she is positive because of her husband, her daily devotionals, having coffee with her friends, doing things that make her happy, like crafting, and helping others. Chris explained that to get through hard times she follows one thing, “trusting that God has a plan and will help us get through it. It might hurt, but we can get through
Widened with amazement, my eyes watched as my fingers swirled the blobs of red and blue paint into a deep purple. The smell of tempera paint and wet wood-chips surrounded me that rainy day in the small playground of De Colores pre-school. I vividly remember feeling that astounded thrice more; first, when I roamed the aisles of Michael’s craft store for the first time, secondly, when I perfected my favorite shrimp dish, and lastly after my first psychology course. Though I have had countless positive and exciting experiences, I have also had some pretty impactful negative ones. Dropping out of high school was the biggest blessing in disguise of my life. It led to my enrollment in a concurrent enrollment program at a local community college that changed my life, through which I met some resilient people that I will always remember. Art therapy is my number one career choice and the Master of Arts in Art Therapy program at Notre Dame de Namur University
When I (Tony Johnson) was younger, I found myself going in the wrong direction. My parents constantly warn me to get all the education that I could especially my high school diploma. I started hanging out and making some bad decision. For this reason, I drop out of high school in 1983, not long after I was being arrested for Robbery. The thing that bothered me the most was letting my parents down. I always knew that they (parents) raised me to have integrity. I will never forget the day I received my sentence (jail) because of the disappointment in their eyes. I knew then that I did not like seeing my parents hurting because of my doing. When I was released in 1984, I wanted to do the right thing by showing my parents that all their hard work raising me will
High school inundates students with memorization tasks and assignments that will just maybe provide enough practice to utilize the info on an upcoming test, however, there is so much emphasis and strain in those areas early on because self-discovery is reserved for the generally more mature young adults pursuing a post-secondary education that “should help students discover what they love to do” (Source B). The idea that college should serve as a staging ground for obtaining a realization of one’s purpose in humanity’s future is not simply a purely idealistic concept, on the contrary, it is expounded upon in testimonials by many college students; they can explicitly identify a new sense of direction carved out in their college years as genuine enlightenment towards where their dreams truly lie. Graduates from four-year colleges have journeyed through the peaks and troughs of undergraduate programs and can testify towards this, as in a sample of graduates surveyed “69%” expressed that college was “very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” (Source F). Developing such self-knowledge of one’s mental processes, whether of enjoyment and dislike or the preferred type of learning, introspection is the window that provides a clear view of what one would willingly strive towards as an adult. Blindly following a career or “calling” via ignorance and inexperience is like hunting for gold in a minefield with a metal detector: sure everything may seem like treasure, but without deeper analysis the extensive path dug may only turn up catastrophe. Blinkered by illusions of wealth and fame, the lack of time to self-reflect on the and study all the aspects of a career field as a college student would only leave pursuers chasing a
My transition to college was successful, but it was nonetheless one of the most stressful times in my life. Unlike many of my peers at Saint Louis University, my rural high school experience did not truly prepare me for the academic rigors of college. Despite extensive preparation, I performed rather poorly on the first round of exams. While I didn’t fail any particular exam, my performance was seriously lacking. I knew that getting C’s on exams would not serve me well in the pursuit of my dream of becoming a physician. I remember feeling, for the first time in my life, that I was unintelligent and incompetent. I was also heavily fatigued from the excessive hours of studying, which I felt were necessary to reconcile the problem. I managed to
I wished I could have helped her more, if just to better her last moments on Earth. With all my hours in clinical shadowing or volunteering, with all my coursework as a graduate student in biomedical engineering—I was not preparred for this. I was not ready to cope with the sense of powerlessness I felt that day.
The term ‘college’ is very hard to define. One can define it as a Utopia of knowledge, where learning is appreciated and it will become useful throughout one’s entire life. Some may also tell that living in a harsh world, ‘college’ is just a place where students enter with an exorbitant amount of money learning things that will not be applied in real life. Consider a hypothetical character John who exemplifies the majority of new students in United States: he feels enthralled and excited to start college, hoping to get a degree at the end of the day. However, John quickly came to a realization that he is not performing at the first few weeks of class. Disillusioned with his bad grades, he simply quit college – and never went back. A fraction of college students also share the same experience as John, with only 30 percent of the entering students actually graduated from a two-year public college (Raley 4). The college dropouts have elevated concern among the government. Despite choosing a cheap alternative, many students still stumble upon studying at community college
I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do with my life after high school. I sat at home, on the computer, searching for careers and colleges majors online, night after night. I’d ask my parents, “What should I do with my life?” They would repeatedly give me the same answer, “Whatever your little heart desires.” That response just made me even more confused and frustrated because it reminded me of how many different options I had to choose from. I knew I wanted to continue my education by attending college, but there are so many aspects to think about when considering a college, such as, the type, cost, size, and distance of the college. I would stay awake in bed at night stressing about it. I knew I wanted to attend a college close
My story began on a cool summer’s night twenty short years ago. From my earliest memory, I recall my father’s disdain for pursuing education. “Quit school and get a job” was his motto. My mother, in contrast, valued education, but she would never put pressure on anyone: a sixty-five was passing, and there was no motivation to do better. As a child, my uncle was my major role-model. He was a living example of how one could strive for greatness with a proper education and hard work. At this tender age of seven, I knew little about how I would achieve my goals, but I knew that education and hard work were going to be valuable. However, all of my youthful fantasies for broader horizons vanished like smoke when school began.
...from high school with high hopes that college would add the finishing touches to my writing skills – I knew I still had flaws in my style, and I didn’t know how to fix them. And now here I am, aiming to become a successful novelist or screenwriter of some sort (as long as it allows my imagination to run wild).
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of my favorite poems for many reasons, but recently it has started to gain new meaning as I face graduation. I have started to wonder how different my life would be if I had only chosen to travel down one road instead of sprinting down both roads at the same time. When I declared my biology major, my dad expressed concern that I was choosing one possible life and career over another possibility. He said he knew how happy writing made me and he wondered if I was doing the right thing in not pursuing that. He spoke the words I had not yet spoken out loud for myself. “You shouldn’t enter college worried about what you will do when you exit,” said David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, at a World Economic Forum panel discussion last week on the state of the humanities. Rubenstein’s words are true now and they were true then: I should not have worried about choosing so soon. After I arrived at Columbia College, I began taking English courses because I could not take biology courses without at least trying to explore my passion for literature and creative writing. Thanks to time at Columbia College, I started to see the value the required courses of the WPDM major more because of what they taught me about myself than what they taught me about the subject matter. Combined with my classes, my internship experiences have confirmed that I am indeed heading in the right direction. I could not become a successful writer and biologist without the valuable set of skills that I have gained through my time at Columbia College. I believe I made the right choice by choosing both roads.
...new classes, I soon realized what would be the biggest challenge of college: deciding on a major. Yes, I am one of those people who started college without first declaring a major. I soon heard every question, suggestion, and response regarding possible options. I even began concocting false majors to throw some people off. Large-Scale Demolition was a crowd favorite.
For so many years I’ve asked myself the question, “what are you going to do with your life?” For a period of time I struggled with this question. Today, I sit staring at my computer, confronting myself, asking my subconscious “what do I want to do for the rest of my life?” Have I finally found the answer I 've been looking for, or am I under the false assumption that this is the right path for me. This semester has been the ultimate opportunity to explore my questions, doubt, issues, and concerns. I feel that by the end of this paper I will have answered all these questions, and will have made the best decision for my future.
Education is an element that is the key to success, and today is not taken seriously enough. People are uninterested so they drop-outs in high school and some leave or flunk-out in their first year of college. So, what is it that’s driving students to drop-out? Students spend too much time and stress with a curriculum that they can’t seem to pass or stay motivated with, and the solution is to alter schools so that the students are encouraged and prepared to go forth through college. Knowing what the key issues are and changing the curriculum so that it prepares them for their futures, is what determines the success of government. Dropping-out isn’t what people should have in mind, so what’s driving them to that point? This could be like that
It was just an ordinary day. The sun had just set and we were all sitting around the table eating dinner. My mother and father always asked us about our future and what we were hoping to accomplish. My brother and sister always explained how they wanted to go into the air force and be doctor. Of course I would just sit there and think about how I didn’t know what I wanted to be. But this particular night I had an idea of what I wanted to do! So before my mom and dad could get out of their mouth the question, I said “I know what I want to be!”. They all stared and asked what that might be and I replied, “A famous artist!” I said, “I want my paintings and sketchings to be shown worldwide!”. They told me that, that was all good and well but that there was a lot of steps to achieve this goal and that it wasn’t very realistic. But what they didn’t know was that very line pushed me to prove them wrong.