Hi, my name is Adam and I didn't do very well in high school.
My family doesn't have connections.
I am not a legacy.
My family didn't have enough money to put food on the table, my parents couldn't worry about my education. All through out my k-12 education I felt like I coasted. I was never inspired to think outside the box. I was an average student, I ended up graduating high school with a 2.55 GPA. Amazing that I did, considering how bored of it I was. I mean, I am not saying that there wasn't good teachers in my life at the time, oh there was, but I didn't feel that the subject matter engaged me. I didn't feel like it made me think. All I did was regurgitate facts, figures, numbers, dates, times and they all clapped and gave me an A.
So, suffice it to say, I sailed my way through school, neglecting to do a shred of homework and acing tests. It gave me a "C", which was fine, I didn't really want to be noticed any way.
A few years later I started feeling a little empty inside. I had failed in my career as an airman, I had failed in my career as a banker, and I find myself sitting at a computer at my mothers house, with whom I moved back in with at the age of 21. My life was in shambles, I just got laid off from the mortgage servicing firm I was working at, and I was horrible adrift. Call it an early twenties identity crisis. I didn't know what direction my life was going in.
My fiancee and I met over the internet (actually on myspace) and we lived right next to each other and quickly fell head over heels in love. She went into the relationship knowing that I had no job, no money, and a bleak future at that point. Nevertheless she and I moved in together after dating for a few months and rapidly steamed forward toward a bright new future together.
There was one problem, though. I had utterly failed at any attempt to put my life together after high school. This trend didn't just stop after I got a girl friend. I got a job at tmobile, which I subsequently quit after finding out that you have to kiss ass and sleep around to get to the top of that sleazy company. I got a few fast food jobs, a pretty awesome security guard job that lasted for a while until a freak snow storm in december of 08 made me miss so much work they fired me.
Suffice it to say, I was a wreck. I could never finish anything I started, I could never get ahead. I began to wonder if my life would just continue to be a complex series of failures, and contemplated giving up entirely on a future better than my parents had.
One fateful day my fiancee played hookie from work and we went out to an Arby's out in Monmouth Oregon for no reason in particular. We weren't sure why we went there, but thats where we went.
We had a deep conversation at that little restaurant. I revealed to her that I never thought I was good enough to go back to school, and I thought that I was doomed to a life of McJobs with no benefits and dignity, low pay, and sixteen year old bosses. She, of course, said that was utter nonsense and encouraged me to look into going back to school.
That fall term I went back. I was sick to my stomach that first day. I felt like vomiting. This was my one shot. The government was nice enough to fund this entire thing (besides what the bank is paying, and they will want that back) and I committed to myself that I would become more than just a fry cook or some cashier somewhere.
Chemeketa Community College, the college that I go to that is located in the heart of good ol Salem Oregon is one of the best community colleges in the state, hands down. Some of the brightest people I have ever met teach there, and they have had so much great affect on me as a person. I have taken so many awesome classes, and learned so many awesome things about the world around me.
Make no mistake, I am not one of those typical community college students who takes one class and thinks he knows everything, but I am not going to hide the fact that even these beginning level classes have opened my mind and challenged my beliefs in ways I never dreamed possible. I have learned so much, I feel like a new person.
The best thing about Community College is that its only the beginning. The foundation. The bedrock to which your entire education is founded on.
A unique thing about Community Colleges like the one in my home town is that they provide an incredible opportunity for people who come from working class and the working poor to get a quality education at an attainable price. I pay 1500 dollars a term in tuition, and 400 dollars a term on books. That is a far cry from what most university and private college lower classmen are paying for their education.
Most of all, it opens up opportunities for the people from those backgrounds, and makes one realize that they can actually afford to go to school and build a better life. It is so depressing, alienating, demoralizing to think that you are going to be a peon for the rest of your life. Community College gives you the confidence you need to go into a university and actually COMPETE with the other students on an academic level.
There is such a high impact to low cost education, especially for someone coming from the same background as me. Remember I wasn't interested in education before I got to college, I floated by. I was never challenged by any of my teachers, and I coasted. But in college I was challenged, and I didn't always get an A. And its made me sharp as a tack intellectually. The highest impact, though, is that it finally gives me hope that I can do better than my parents and grandparents did in this life.
My academic goal is to give back to the system that gave so much to me. How could I take this beautiful gift -- of enlightenment, of intellectual awakening, and not want to share it with others? So from this point on, I dedicate myself to coming back to Chemeketa Community College and working there, and giving back to the people who gave me so much hope for my own future.