Things I Wish I'd Known in High School . . . by Tara Bowman

I’m a first generation college student; a path blazer; a trend setter; you might even say that I’m a visionary.

Before you go getting the wrong idea, though, I’m here to tell you that it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. Sure, going to college was the best decision I’ve ever made, and choosing Corning was the second best decision I’ve ever made; but there are certain perks to having college ‘veterans’ to guide you along the way.

During my senior year of high-school, I had the daunting task of choosing an educational institution to begin my journey to epic awesomeness. While a lot of my peers were receiving advice and insight from older siblings, moms, dads, cousins, and the lot, I was blindly forging ahead, making one of the biggest decisions of my life. Like, I suspect, a lot of high-school seniors in my position were doing, I made a lot of assumptions:

• I made the assumption that when I graduated from high-school, I had to dive head first into my next educational affair. That’s what you do, right? In reality, taking a year off to ‘figure things out’ served me quite well. I got a taste for how much it sucks to work your butt off, doing something you don’t enjoy, for very little money.
• I made the assumption that whichever school offered me the most money would be the best for me. Seems logical, I suppose. There are a lot of things I wasn’t, and should’ve been taking into consideration, such as, if I even like the school. [Take my word for it; this directly affects your success!]
• I also assumed that the ‘norm’ was to choose a school, take out loans, graduate, and be up to my eyeballs in debt for twenty or thirty years. Everyone else has to go through that, so I will too, right?

If there’s one thing that I wish someone had told me when I was a senior in high-school, is that more money doesn’t equal a better education. I started out at a four-year college, with a hefty scholarship. Without doing the math, [the scholarship to tuition ratio] I accepted. I was flattered that this school was recognizing my hard work, and was convinced I wouldn’t get a better offer anywhere else; and if I’m paying that much money, it has to be top of the line. I soon found out, “you get what you pay for” isn’t consistently accurate. My class sizes were much bigger than I was used to, I was lectured to in class, instead of taught, and I was paying a lot of substantial fees for things I wasn’t even using. It didn’t take me very long to realize it wasn’t a good fit for me. I was never challenged, I was never enthused about the subject matters, and I certainly wasn’t too keen on the price I was paying for something I had no interest in.

I’ve learned more in one week at CCC than I did in four, at a larger institution, and at a very small fraction of the cost.

I often wish someone had let me on that secret. Julia Duncan—a CCC graduate, class of 1998, summed it up pretty well: “By spending my first two years of college at CCC, I enjoyed small class sizes and professors I could meet with and talk to outside of the classroom. My friends at larger, more expensive schools had lecture halls filled with 400 students and classes taught half the time by teaching assistants. We got similar educations, but I had the better experience for much less money.”