The summer I turned 18 went by too quickly, and soon it was time for me to go to college. I did not want to go! After going to school nine months a year for 13 years, I was ready for a break. If only my family had been rich, perhaps I could have spent the next year touring Europe like the spoiled kids I read about in books. But no, our family was just a middle class working family, trying to get by like most of the world. Even going straight to a University was out of the question. It was Junior College for me. I was OK with that,though. It would have been infinitely harder to go straight from high school into a University. Mesa Community College was plenty big enough to scare the daylights out of me.
I remember the first day I went to MCC. I was too old to have mom take me down to register, so I drove myself. On the one hand, I felt remarkably old and mature as I drove into the huge parking lot, picked up my purse and schedule, and climbed out of the car.
There were so many buildings! Looking at the map on the back of the Fall Semester Booklet I found the registration building, then set out across campus to find where I was supposed to go. MCC was so big! I finally found my way to registration, signed up for the classes I wanted, and dropped my jaw when I saw how much it was going to cost. College was expensive! Worse, all the books required for my classes added up to almost as much as the tuition. How could they charge almost a hundred dollars for one stupid book? I was shocked!
It turned out I could buy most of my books used, which helped. After finishing the classes I resold some of the books back to the bookstore, but it was still expensive! Part of the reason it cost so much was because I took 16 hours. Most of the kids I knew only took 12 hours their first semester, that was considered a full load, but I really, really wanted to get through with school as fast as I could, so I decided to take as many classes as possible. It turned out 16 hours was easy, and I was able to load up every semester and managed to move on to ASU in a year, graduating in three years instead of four. That was nice.
I discovered something else amazing. College was fun! Perhaps it was the broken up days that made it so different. Instead of going to school everyday from 8:00 to 3:00, my schedule was spread out through the week, with classes in the mornings some days, in the afternoons some, even in the evenings sometimes. Added all together I probably spent more time in college than I did in high school, but it felt different.
No one took roll in college, either. If I missed a class, oh well. What mattered was if I knew the material, handed in the assignments, and took the tests. How I gathered the information was up to me. The advice I learned on my first day in High School came into good use in college. When I sat on the front row and paid attention in class, making eye contact with the teacher so he knew I was listening, I got A's. Always. Plus, it was a lot easier to listen to the teacher rather than read the textbook, at least for me.
I didn't love all of my classes, Freshmen English and Reading were boring; Freshman Math and Biology were a pain; but when offset with Psychology, English Lit, Yoga, and all the other fun classes I took at MCC I had a wonderful time. It was so cool to get to learn stuff I was interested in.
Mom and Dad were pleased with my grades and happy that I was getting the most out of my education. I was happy, too, and pleasantly surprised that I loved going to college after all, and glad they hadn't let me talk them into letting me take a year off after I graduated from High School.
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