The University 12 Miles Away

In the New York Times article “I Owe It All to Community College: Tom Hanks on His Two Years at Chabot College” published January 2015, the author Tom Hanks talks about his experience in Community College. The article being published in the New York Times was directed at an older group of people. Hanks begins the article effectively persuading the reader that Community College changes the lives of the students who attend. Hanks addressed his experience at a two-year junior college in Hayward, California with positive critique. Hanks’ succeeds with his claims of community college being a alternative to students in search of a afforable higher education, through his use of ethos, pathos, and logos.

This paper explores the history of Charleston Southern University located in the heart of the Lowcountry in Charleston, South Carolina. With its core Christian values, Charleston Southern achieves an atmosphere that most universities cannot. The history of this school can be pinpointed back to 1964 when it was initially founded (University History and Milestones, 2015). The early years were fairly rough, with low enrollment rates and very few majors being offered (Joslin, Merkling, & Strubel, 2014). However, the university went through countless changes that drove it to be the successful school that it is today. Now, Charleston Southern University is an academically excellent school and also a member of the NCAA Division I Big South Conference. This school started as merely an idea and expanded into a thriving university full of thousands of students.

During high school, I struggled to maintain my grades and focus. I was in a small town, and every ounce of opportunity seemed to slowly be sucked away from the town as the years past with the aid of the downward economic spiral beginning. I felt, like many of my fellow classmates, that opportunity had passed us by. I didn’t dare conjure even the thought of attending Eastern; it would’ve been too similar to the

Last summer, I hiked the Appalachian Trail with my wonderful partner Travis—who graduated from WCU with a Bachelor’s in Psychology. This was our first big hike together on the AT; spanning over 400 miles in just about 30 days. It was an incredible experience that grounded me and influenced a new-found discipline that only genuinely wholehearted, physically-taxing effort can provide. I was enlightened to my own personal values, goals, and abilities in such a way that I could analyze them as a network, as opposed to individual aspects of my life. I uncovered my path to continue wholly dedicating myself to my studies and my ambitions; I found what was truly important to me and what I truly wanted. Within this experience, I resolved to have “West Chester University” on my

The transition from high school to college is a dynamic time in one’s life that parallels the change from childhood to adulthood. Both of these changes are dramatic and, as a result, feelings are difficult to put down into words. A messy combination of emotions fills the heart, surfacing in strange ways. Confident high school seniors go right back to the bottom of the chain when entering college as freshmen. These students start all over, just like entering grade school or high school for the first time. The move up from high school to college signals the switch from dependence to self-sufficiency. From a personal point of view, going through the experience of graduating high school and transferring to a residential college campus at STLCOP, made me realize I was no longer a kid and capable of making my own decisions.

Throughout my life as a child and teenager, I was told by my parents that they worked really hard to get to the safe town and community that we lived in. Growing up in Pacific Grove, California gave me lots opportunities that I didn’t even know I obtained. Unless it had happened to me personally, I didn’t really understand the full picture of what others had to go through. Having dyslexia, the only subject I felt I really excelled in was art. After high school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do for a career or even a major. Monterey Peninsula College has boosted my confidence by showing me that I can be and do much more. Two years ago I would never have guessed that I would be applying to the University of Washington.

From the time I was in junior high, my grandmother had been telling me about College of the Ozarks and trying to convince me to attend the college. After much consideration, I decided to make College of the Ozarks my top priority when applying to colleges. The atmosphere of the college, the perfect distance from home, and the opportunity to work for my education were all major factors when making this decision. I had attended private Christian schools for most of my life, so the small campus and Christian values of College of the Ozarks appealed to me much more than the chaotic partying ways of a larger university. I knew if I attended College of the Ozarks, many of my classes would be more difficult than at a public university; however, I saw the difficult classes as an opportunity to learn more, which I believed would help me later in life. I also knew the professors at College of the Ozarks would be more caring and more willing to help than those at other colleges.

This is a reflective essay concerning my READ 3423.01 with Dr. Reid in the fall of 2016. As I wrap up my first semester at Texas Women’s University I am awed and thankful. I am the first person in my family to attend University. Some find this surprising because I do come from a family that has done well professionally, but that was due to grit and personalities. The fact is, I was never even spoken to about attending college while I was growing up. I believe this is because no one before me had this experience to share or encourage. The truth is I tried my hardest to not be at school from middle school on, I just wasn’t engaged in the process. Of course, there were a few teachers I connected with, like the business and history teachers, but I hated the rules and structure of the environment. I amazedly graduated with my high school class, as my friends went away to Universities I took some classes at the community college. What I found was that when I got to pick my classes I flourished. Even the classes that others said were too hard to take during summer quarter, I excelled in those as well. As life unfolded I got married, moved out of state and had two daughters. When it was time for my daughters to attend school I was pretty apprehensive about the idea of it. I opened a preschool in a mother-in-law apartment we had on our property and decided they could learn there in a small community. That preschool led to homeschooling, and large educational co-ops. I lived in a

These hours with Jerry, waiting for a ride home, or the hour we took for lunch, proved to be my favorite time of day. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College I was desperate to go back to school, I spent hours a day applying to graduate school (for two years in a row), I wrote personal statements and essays about my academic pursuits, I wrote about the importance of an academic community for personal growth without really realizing that I was already enrolled in Professor Jarrell Jackman’s seminar “Tips to live a successful and rewarding

Two years ago, when I was faced with the difficult task of choosing a college, I turned to my family for advice. My three oldest siblings, despite their natural bias as Notre Dame alumni, helped me weigh my options thoughtfully and considerately. Talking to them individually about their alma mater, however, I quickly noticed a common thread between their musings which ultimately convinced me to follow in their footsteps: each passionately emphasized the unique opportunities available to them at Notre Dame, opportunities which elevated the school’s role beyond that of mere instructional facilitation— Notre Dame is dedicated to the comprehensive formation of its students. Now, as student myself at Our Lady’s University, I understand what my siblings

The love of University of Arizona never stopped in Ms. Mesa’s heart. She grew up in Tucson and after she graduated from high school, she didn’t considered any other college but University of Arizona. Since then she had remained a student in some form for her entire adult life by

The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School stands out to me over other liberal arts colleges due to its unique classroom dynamic as well as strong focus on academic freedom and social justice. I am excited that The New School gives students the ability to personalize their major and pick classes appropriate to their interests. I value this academic freedom since it will allow me to explore and expand my interests as well as enlighten me in fields I am unfamiliar with. Lang’s focus on intellectual freedom will allow me to expand on prior knowledge, but also allow me to branch out and take more academic risks. Lang encourages this risk-taking by giving students control of shaping their own major. With this ability I will be able to learn from risks I take and find new values to my education, and

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing a great inspiration to me, my mother, Stephanie Sacks, about her experience in college. She went to Evergreen State College for her baccalaureate degree. She enjoyed the vast majority of the classes she took; “All of Evergreen was sort of an extracurricular.”, she said. The one she didn’t like was a biology class. “I absolutely hated that class.”, she remembered. The room was so warm, and the lectures so boring, that she fell asleep on multiple occasions. “Thank god I didn’t go to a regular college, because I would have absolutely hated it,” She chuckled. “I hated studying things I had no interest in.” Her favorite part of college was getting to pick which classes she took, which she said, “...was

McCandless argues that even up until the late 1930’s southern women were held to strict standards including restrictions on attire, outings, and even males. She calls this standard the pedestal. After analyzing scores of editions of The Briar Patch from the 1930’s up through the mid 1970’s it is clear that a change was happening; beginning with the mid-to-late 1960’s that moved away from this pedestal she describes. McCandless discusses the importance of traditions in all-women’s colleges in both the North and the South; but also recognizes that southern women’s colleges held onto these ideologies longer than their northern counterparts. May Day is just one example of an important tradition that was held closer to the heart of the women in the south. While northern colleges were making way for new ideas colleges in the south still clung to the ideas of the past. For example, when May Day

While deciding on colleges to apply to, Swarthmore was consistently in the back of my mind. From various sources across my hunt for colleges, I had constantly heard about Swarthmore’s excellence as a learning institution, and how it was a frontrunner in liberal arts colleges, my ideal type of university. Despite these prospects, I committed myself to not making the decision to apply unless I really could see myself attending, and it was with my own investigation of Swarthmore that I was developed a personal motivation to apply.