Last year, I posted here about choosing between two colleges I wasn’t overly thrilled to be choosing between. I went to orientation week 1,500 miles away from home and could not handle the anxiety as someone sheltered.
I went home and enrolled in community college courses I knew would be somewhat relevant to my future career interests, was put on anxiety medication, and got a job. Seeing my peers go to what I thought were “real” universities versus community college, which I had negatively perceived as play university, devastated me. That feeling went away pretty fast as the year started. I learned how to allocate my own time, to handle my own money, how to properly study! And it was harder than I thought, I scraped by in my math courses by the graces of my kind professors. They were very kind and accessible, something I believe wouldn’t have been as easy at a 4-year university. My math professor spoke about the topic with such passion that it infected me. I’m admittedly not very good at math, but thinking about his excitement on the topics makes me want to persist and see what makes him so excited.
I reapplied this year as a transfer and got into UCSB and USC, and me a year ago would’ve never thought so. Don’t rush into college because you’re told to do so - my focus on SAT scores, extracurriculars, grades had blinded me from finding a true interest. When all of the superficial worries fell away and I was able to focus, the future wasn’t so doom and gloom. Thank you to everyone who was incredibly kind and resourceful to me last year, I learned a lot and don’t know what I would’ve done without this community.
