Angelo State University Top Questions

I learned that my college experience is a culmination of ever thing that I have ever learned. The simple things in life that we often take for granted resurfaced when i got to college. One thing that really stands out from kindergarten was being able to communicate your basic needs. In college everybody is narcissistic. All of the students had to lok out for themselves. We have students from all over the would. Some are various colors and they speak various languages. Nobody has time to baby another person. If you don't ask or communicate with someone you will be merely left out. I also used a lot of my observation skills that we take for granted. I took time to observe the differnt individuals that were consantly in my presence. It did not take me long to figure out how each persons thought process. People are basically the same with a few deviations here and there. Once the observaton process was over I was able to proceed with caution. I met some really nice people who did have a set of morals and values. However, that was all a learning experience.

It is tough to say what I have gotten out of college thus far. I am returning from a short break of about a decade and i am just getting back into the swing of things. It has been a tough adjustment from the professionsal world to the world of academia, but it has been absolutely worth it. Being in college has given me an optimistic view of the future. I no longer feel trapped in a job that i don't love but don't hate enough to quit. The thought of the future once weighed me down with a feeling of mediocrity and entrapment. There seemed no end in sight to the general malaise I was in. Attending college showed it's value immediately with the improvement of my spirits. The challenge of coming back to school is nothing compared to facing a future in which there is little hope for professional fulfillment. I am confident the financial benefits of college will reveal themselves in time, but the hope of a brighter future has a far greater value.

I am taking online classes at Berklee to improve my playing ability for entrance next fall. Besides improving my playing ability I am learning discipline and how to prioritize my time between class assignments , practice and work. I now have goals and am learning what I need to do to obtain them. I am about to finish my second of three classes and I now realize how much time, work and money is going to be needed to realize my goal. I also now know why my mother kept telling me, while I was still in high school, to figure out what I wanted to do and to start working on it. I think I would do well in a college environment, if I can come up with some ways to help pay for it.

I have gained alot of knowledge about my feild of study, It has been valuable to me because nobody in my family has every attended college so i am the first and i im looking forward to showing everyone that i can do it.

I think the most important thing I have gotten from my college experience is a greater sense of who I am. Before starting college I was always refered to as the girl who was the stereotypical girl nerd; however, since I started college I have gone from being a member of a stereotype to being my own person. With the freedom of being able to make my own decisions with out fear of reprecussions by my parents, I began to feel that I was fully responsible for all of my own decisions and that I had to deal with the consequences of my actions myself. I quickly learned that I was not a party-girl and I would likely never be one, I also learned that I was (as my friends called me) an old soul in a young body because of my passion for history. I began to interact more and more with people that were older than me in order to learn as much about history as I could, and I feel that my passion for history simply just keeps growing as I learn more and more about it. Hopefully, that passion will never fade from my life.

I graduated from Ohio Virtual Academy High school in 2009 and am currently taking a year off from school. I will attend university this fall so I am looking for scholarships in case my school of choice doesn't offer me enough money to cover my entire tuition. Since I have not yet had my own college life experience, I can't give my past self any advice with reguards to choosing or preparing for life in university. On the other hand, I have had a lot of time to look back and think about how I handled my very stressful last year of high school and I do have some improvements to suggest. I would tell my high school senior self to take fewer AP course in first semester and to instead spread them out over the year. Also , though I multi tasked well within school, I should have found a better balance between it and my social life. Because of my all work and no play mentality I missed out on a lot of fun activities with my peers and though I was able to attain certain grades, it has left my feeling regretful and somewhat empty now.

I would tell myself to buckle down more as a high school senior. I wish I could have gotten good enough grades to where I could go to a bigger college than I do now. I think that at a bigger college there would be more classes and it would be a limited amount of people attending unlike a community college. At a community college, you don't have to be accepted anyone can attend a community college which makes it harder because there are more seats taken. Also, I would go back and teach my self how to make better study habbits. In college I have found that it is crucial if you don't study and it can really effect you. Unlike high school where I was able to pass a quiz easily with out having to study at all. This semester I have learned to buckle down and study in advance to where I will be more than well prepared for a test.

There are many things I have learned in my first few months at college. There were things I was prepared for and other that caught me completely off guard and knocked me on my back. If I could go back in time and talk to myself as a high school senior, the first thing I would tell myself would be to apply for more scholarships and definately do not miss the financial aid deadlines. Worrying about money was my main stress and could have been easily avoided. After drilling into my past self the importance of financial aid, I would tell myself to have fun and embrace the oppourtunity to explore a new city with new people and challenge myself academically. I would tell myself to try new things and not be afraid of changing my major if I felt nursing wasn't a right fit for me and not to be pressured to be any one but myself. Although there are things I might have liked to avoid my first year in college, the experiences, whether mistakes or not, were nessecary and even needed. If I had been warned, I might ot have learned certain lessons.

If I were to be graduating early i would better plan for the transistion make up my mind early nd pepare myself more in advance to deal with the financial aid and the class scheduling nd all.

Don't slack off just because its your senior year!