Before we begin today, I need to go ahead and add one thing that I missed in my last
episode on community college part one.
I was talking about the different people that should be considering, if not actually straight
up attending community college.
And there's one group of people that I think is going to be important for us to highlight.
There's some people who are looking to go to a vocational school.
Career colleges are not there to train you for a particular job, but vocational school
is, right?
And these are the kind of professions where at college you're learning the specific skill
sets and oftentimes there's a specific certificate that goes along with it that indicates that
you're capable of doing certain types of jobs, whether it's mechanic or woodwork or metalwork
or electronics or nursing.
There's certain programs where it's not merely like a head heavy course.
There's a lot of hands on things that you need to learn.
And so those programs are available at community colleges and I rarely find them to be available
at least extensively at any four year college.
But community college is a place you'll find it.
Now the reason I want to stress this is that there are going to be places that advertise
these vocational programs and they're for profit colleges.
You might have seen commercials for them, often in the daytime.
I've seen them anyways.
And honestly those programs piss me off in part because they're going to take your money,
they're going to get you to sign up for a bunch of student loans, promise you a bunch
of stuff that they can't promise.
A lot of these programs are not accredited, at least in the for profit colleges, not necessarily
accredited by respectable accreditation.
So the places that people should be going if they are wanting to get those opportunities
where they just live their life, they had a high school degree, and they don't want
to go to a full blown college, four year college and get a degree.
They're just wanting to learn how to develop a certain skill so that they could work in
that industry.
Vocational school is the way to go and the place to go for it that you could really trust
is actually going to be community colleges.
Now I say this knowing full well that community colleges are unfortunately very much under
funded in this area.
And this might be something that we could collectively call on our government to invest
a little bit more in.
But I think if people, if the community colleges were better funded, I think it would be clear
that this is a much better choice than going to any of the for profit ones.
But the for profit ones are there.
I personally think of many of them, if not all of them, as straight up scam artists.
I don't trust them.
They're trying to make money and they make money off of offering up loans and then getting
you to pay ridiculous tuition and promising things that they can't really follow through
on.
So those of you who are interested in vocational programs, I encourage you to look around.
As I mentioned last time, each community college will vary in what they could offer.
And some of the larger, better funded community colleges are going to be able to offer more
programs.
So you might have to do a little bit of digging as to which particular community college would
be best fit for you.
But those of you who are interested in these sorts of certificates, these sorts of programs,
I want to make sure that you go to the right place, to a place you could trust.
And that'll definitely be community colleges.
Okay?
Now on to our show.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Community College Part 2 at the Pop Out.
My name is Albert Shin.
And today, last time we focused on who might be a good candidate for community colleges
and why we should take community colleges, I think, seriously in terms of the role that
they play in the overall education system.
Today, I want to speak directly to my students and those of you that are looking to transfer
and the kinds of things that you need to be mindful of as you prepare for your transition
from community college to a four-year institution.
Okay?
All right.
So there's several things that we need to kind of go down, a list of things that we
need to go over.
First off, the transfer process is extremely different in terms of what colleges look for
than when you're going straight from high school.
Okay?
As I mentioned last time, high school students, it's understandable that many of them don't
know exactly what they want to do.
And this is partly because in high school, you're offered a certain subset of courses,
right?
You have your basic history classes, and it could be world history, it could be, you know,
US history.
You might be offered economics.
You might be offered psychology.
I mean, your mileage will vary depending on the school you went to.
Most of them will offer all the basic sciences, biology, chemistry, and so on, and English,
right?
And then maybe foreign languages and arts and et cetera, et cetera.
Okay?
One of the things you realize once you get to college is that there's actually a range
of specializations, right?
These are the different majors that are offered.
And in most colleges, you're going to have hundreds of different majors, right?
Which means that there's a whole lot of different things that you could specialize in, and many
of them are topics that you've never, ever heard of.
Never ever heard of.
Okay?
And so it's not necessarily expected that you know exactly what you want to do.
You might have some general sense of the direction you want to go into, but you know, you might
not know exactly what you want to specialize in or how much of a specialization you really
want to have within that area.
Okay?
So, you know, if you are thinking about it from a high school, like somebody expecting
something from high school, it makes sense that you don't really care too much whether
or not they have everything figured out.
Okay?
But the story is very different when you're transferring, right?
You got to think of community college, those two years of work, worth of work in community
college.
You might see it as the first two years of a four-year college, right?
And this is the period where students are doing the discovering of what they want to,
you know, focus in on.
What kind of direction they want to go during their time in college.
This is the time where they take the general education classes where they explore the different
topics that sound interesting to them.
Okay?
And by the time, in the four-year college, by the time you hit your, you know, third
year, the expectation is that you have everything together.
You know what you want to specialize in.
You take those major classes and then you graduate, right?
So if you're thinking of it in those lines, right, then what is it that a college will
be looking for from specifically a transfer student?
They're going to be looking for somebody who has their shit together.
Somebody who knows what they want to accomplish, right?
Have taken the prerequisite courses they need to accomplish that goal.
Okay?
They're not looking for somebody who's going to dilly-dally and not know exactly where
they want to go.
The ideal situation would be to have transfer over and in two years finish up your major
courses and then get out, right?
They don't want a transfer student to stick around for three, four, five years.
That is not their hope.
They want you to get in, get out in two years, right?
So what's most important for a transfer student is that you have all the things that need
to get done, done specifically your general education requirements and your major requirements,
okay, along with having a clear sense of direction of where you want to go, right?
You should have spent that time in community colleges, a community college figuring that
out, right?
By the time you transfer, it's too late, right?
You should have figured it out before you submitted that transfer application, okay?
And that's going to be reflected in what it is that they're actually looking for when
they're selecting candidates out of the transfer pool, okay?
So the transfer pool, they're actually reviewing these applications in a way that is very different,
right, in many ways than they would somebody straight out of high school, okay?
What are they going to care about?
They're going to care about whether you got everything together that you need to so that
you could just take off and then finish in two years, right?
So ideally, what they're going to be looking for is did you complete all the requirements
that you needed to so that you only need to complete your major and upper division course
requirements, okay?
And they're going to be looking that you have a clear sense of direction.
And how do you demonstrate that?
You demonstrate that primarily with the classes you've taken, right, making sure you've covered
all your bases and completed all the GE requirements.
And then you also demonstrated by having, sorry, what is it, having a clear sense of
your major, your specialization, what you want to specialize in, and that you're capable
of doing the work in those areas.
And you demonstrate that specifically through your grades, right?
You show that you can actually handle the course load in this particular field, right?
Another way you demonstrate it is actually in your personal statement, where you set
out a clear, right, you clearly communicate clearly that you know exactly what you want
to accomplish, how you're planning on accomplishing it while you're at, you know, the four-year
college and what you plan on doing it out with it afterwards, right?
In other words, they're expecting students who are a lot more intentional about why they're
transferring over to the particular college, okay?
You need to have more stuff figured out than somebody going at it from a high school, directly
from high school, okay?
All right.
What does this mean?
This means that during your time at a community college, there are some things that you definitely
need to prepare, right?
What exactly do you need to prepare?
You need to prepare a body of work that indicates that you are not planning on dilly-dallying
and that you have that clear sense of direction, okay?
Everything you present in your application should reflect that, okay?
There should be some sort of consistency in terms of the classes you take, in terms of
the extracurricular activities you do, in terms of, I mean, work, you might just need
a work just to make ends meet, right?
But if work also aligns with the overall goals in your life, great.
That'll be even better, right?
The last thing a college wants is for a transfer student to come in and then change their mind
and then say they want to do something else, okay?
That is the last thing they want.
They don't want you to do that.
In fact, there are some impacted majors where if you don't apply as that particular major,
they're not going to let you into that major, okay?
All right.
So while you're at community college, then what should you try to do, okay?
Last time I talked about special agreements between colleges, right?
In California, the agreements between community colleges and UCs and Cal states are such that
if you take specific set of classes, general education classes, then whether or not those
classes necessarily line up with the four-year college's general education requirement, they
will agree to have your community college work fulfill all of the general education
requirement, okay?
There's the, for CSU, there's a special agreement.
For UCs, I believe it's called IGETC, or it's like an acronym for something.
I'm not even going to say exactly what it is because I don't remember.
It's been a while since I did the counseling stuff.
But you know, the idea here is if you complete your general education before you transfer
over to that four-year college, okay, if it's the right set of courses, if you finish IGETC
or the CSU agreement, then they will not hold you to additional general education requirements,
okay?
I don't know if other states have this, but I hope they do because this is actually really
helpful because each college has a different set of requirements.
It's really hard to try to fulfill the requirements for all of them, okay?
But these general education requirements will fulfill basic writing requirements, will fulfill
those general education where you have to take a variety of different courses in different
areas.
They will not hold you to taking a specific class as long as it's under the prearranged
agreement between these colleges, okay?
All right.
It's a little bit harder with private colleges.
Now in regional areas, so like in California, for instance, right, I know that some of the
private colleges like USC has certain agreements with community colleges, okay, because they
get a lot of the transfer applications from community college students within California,
okay?
But not all private colleges do.
And so it gets a little bit complicated and you're going to have to really look into it
if you're trying to transfer over to a private college as opposed to one of the public universities,
okay?
All right.
But ideally you have that done.
So that's the first thing.
That's a bare minimum that you should aim to try to finish, which means you need to
be really on top of your plan while you're at community college, okay?
You need to be talking to an academic counselor, know what kind of requirements, what the requirements
are, how to fulfill those requirements, what combination of classes are going to ensure
that you have it completed.
You should also double check to make sure once you do complete it that you have been,
you know, officially given credit for it, right?
These are all going to be important, okay?
Second, you should have a clear major decided by the time you're done with your, before
you actually start applying for, to transfer, okay?
You should have, so don't try to decide at the moment of applying.
You should already know because you need to have made sure, you need to make sure that
you take all the prerequisite major courses.
This is different from the general education requirements, right?
So what you want to make sure you do is that you complete, right?
For instance, if you're doing, you know, going with a philosophy major, you've taken all
the requisite philosophy, lower division introductory courses so that you don't have to take them
when you're at the four-year college, right?
At the four-year college, the expectation is that you take the more advanced specialized
classes as opposed to those introductory ones, okay?
So the introductory courses that are offered at the community college, you should have
those done, the ones that are required for a particular major, okay?
Now the agreement between these schools are going to be different.
So again, you need to talk, you need to be in constant communication with an academic
counselor at your community college to make sure that you have all the requirements for
the particular major you're interested in, that you have it completed by the time you're
applying for these transfer, applying to transfer, okay?
So these are just basic requirements of things you need to get done, okay?
The next thing I do want to know, okay, because these are college classes, right, and before
in high school, they were looking at your high school grades and then trying to decipher
from your high school grades and your SAT scores how you would perform at the college
level, right?
But once you start taking actual college classes like you would be at a community college,
right, the grades themselves are an indicator of what you're capable of doing, right?
So this is the next thing you need to be extremely mindful of, okay, which is that for transfer
protocol, grades matter a whole lot more.
Grades matter a whole lot more, okay?
And that's partly because there's not as much guesswork.
There's more of a one-to-one correspondence with the grades, okay?
If you get straight A's at the community college level, they can trust that.
If you get straight A's in high school, it depends on the high school you went to, right?
That's why they look...
This is part of the reason that they do holistic evaluations in a lot of places and why a lot
of colleges, a lot of competitive ones especially, have started requiring, when they decided
not to require during the pandemic period, they started requiring SAT and ACT scores
again.
And the reason for it is that grades are only one metric and they don't know how much of
it they could trust.
They give it some weight, right, but they're not sure how good of an indicator that is
that you're going to perform well at the college level.
But at a community college, right, the expectation is that all these courses are introductory
college courses, right?
So if you get an A in one of these classes, then they could expect that you can do just
fine, that you are prepared to be able to fulfill your duties as a student in terms
of passing classes at a four-year college, right?
They can expect it because it's not meant to be any different than a first or second
year class at one of these four-year colleges, okay?
So grades are extremely important.
Grades are extremely important.
And with the selective schools, grades are going to be very, very important.
You're going to want to go ahead and get the highest grades possible.
Now does that mean you have to get straight As?
No, that's not what it means, okay?
But ideally, ideally, you're going to have an extremely high GPA, okay?
The other thing that you want to make note of is if you're able to, if your community
college offers it, take the honors classes and get into the honors program, okay?
If you're able to handle it, that is the case.
It is more work.
It's more time-consuming.
Some community college students don't have that time, and that's perfectly fine, right?
But it does give you an advantage, right?
And there are special programs that specific UCs, for instance, have to take my school,
for example, Pasadena City College.
There's agreements, it's the TAG program, where they say, look, if you meet a certain
GPA, you are enrolled in the honors program, you accomplish, right, you do all the GE requirements
and all this, then you'll definitely get into one of the UCs, right?
Whether it's going to be one of the ones that you want to get into, that you'll have to
see, right?
But you're at least guaranteed a spot, right?
So there are certain agreements that exist with community colleges here in California
that tells you, hey, these are going to definitely be advantageous.
And honors program is one of them.
Honors program is going to be one of them.
You definitely want to take advantage of that.
It gives you, again, an advantage.
It gives you one additional thing you could put on your application that makes you look
like a better candidate, a better fit, right?
And it's not to say that those who don't do it should not, you know, or is not deserving
of a spot.
That's not the case, right?
Like I said, with all of these applications, there's some degree of luck involved, right?
Who reads your personal statement?
What the specific college needs in terms of the student body because of the balance of
the students with their different interests, right?
Like it'll vary from year to year, right?
So you never know for sure, but if you want to give yourself the best shot possible, this
is one way to do it, right?
Get the highest grades possible.
Make sure you complete all the requirements that you need to both for your major and the
general education and do it with also completing the honors program, okay?
Beyond that, beyond that, you want to make sure that if there's any extracurriculars
or jobs or internships that you did, because you could still do these at the community
college level, right?
If there's anything that you did, you want to make sure that there is a clear picture
of how these things are connected to your overall goals, okay?
You want to make sure there's a clear picture of how these are all connected.
Does that mean that if you want to go into pre-med that, you know, you have to do some
medical internship?
That's not what it means, okay?
It just needs to, you just need to be able to create a cohesive story.
Let me give you an example, right?
I had a student who was interested in going into law, but a lot of the extracurriculars
that were done was, you know, environmental science programs, right?
And so you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense.
If you want to go into law, why are you doing all these things?
Well, he wants to be a lawyer specifically protecting environmental entities, right?
You know, fighting for climate change through the legal system, okay?
That makes a lot of sense.
Then your extracurriculars kind of make some sense, right?
Now does this mean that you can't also include things like your personal hobbies and things
that you enjoy?
No, that's not what it means, right?
You could have those too, right?
But you want to be mindful about what you invest your time in because your time is a
precious limited resource.
You don't have time for everything.
You want to demonstrate that you have a kind of clear focus in the direction you want to
go.
And you're not demonstrating that if you're doing a bunch of different things that interest
you but have nothing to do with your overall goal for what you're trying to get out of
college, right?
If you're spending like all of your extra time on random hobbies that are in no way
connected to your academic pursuit, right?
Then it does, it's not that it's a red flag, but it is going to raise at least some questions,
some need for explanation as to why you're spending your time doing these things when
you claim that your primary interest is something else altogether, right?
So the idea behind it is that as you spend that time at a community college, right, you're
building up a resume and you're building up that resume not just with your grades, not
just with the classes you took, not just with the honors program showing that you're taking
this seriously and you're really pursuing it as far as you can or that, you know, and
then you're also wanting to demonstrate it specifically with the things you do outside
of the classroom, right?
You want to demonstrate it with those things, right?
That you want to say, hey, I definitely am telling you when I say I want to pursue, for
instance, a degree in sociology, I mean it.
I'm actually passionate about this.
I'm actually wanting to do something with it.
I'm not going to go into university and change my mind.
I know what I want to do.
I have a clear set of goals.
My classes demonstrate it.
My grades demonstrate it.
And my extracurriculars all demonstrate the exact same thing, right?
That's the ideal application, right?
That's the ideal application, okay?
That said, how does this translate then over to what you put in your personal statement?
Here it's actually going to be more or less the same as the strategy that I have already
suggested for those going straight from high school to a four-year college, which is, again,
don't lose focus of the purpose of the personal statement.
The purpose is for you to be informative, to explain things that are not in other parts
of your application, right?
And then secondly, to provide a cohesive story.
The only thing that's different is that the cohesive story that you need to present is
going to be a little bit more detailed and directed and narrow than it would be for somebody
going straight from high school to a four-year college, right?
Given everything I've said, it should kind of start making some sense here, right?
Your personal statement, right, though you're adding information that's not in other parts
of your application, should contextualize the rest of your application and make it clear
that there is a very specific direction and that you are aware of the direction that you're
wanting to go into and you're clear about how the university that you're applying to
fits in with those overall goals, okay?
So let's take the example, again, of the environmental lawyer, the student pursuing environmental
law, right?
What would be an application that kind of completes this picture?
Well, what would it look like?
It would look like, as we stated before, why is it that you're pursuing it?
How can I know that this is not just some passing interest that you have that you might
lose interest in later on, but rather something that is much more deeply personal to you,
right?
So there might be a story here about why the environment matters.
It could be just a simple set of stories about childhood experiences, engaging with nature.
It could be about family memories of going on these trips.
I don't know.
I don't know why you might have pursued it, right?
It could be some heartbreaking documentary or doing some volunteer activity and seeing
something in person.
I don't know.
And I don't know why specifically through law.
Why law instead of something else, right?
Why are you doing it in this particular way rather than something like activism or going
into politics, right?
Or doing some community organizing, right?
Why in this specific way, right, do you want to accomplish these goals?
And there's probably a story there.
It could be that you, after your studies or through other things, you realize that this
is the way to make the most impact.
Or it could be that you've realized that you have a passion for the law as well and that
this is one place where these passions align, right?
Some sort of story that kind of creates this holistic picture of everything that you've
been doing and why it makes sense that they can trust that you are who you say you are,
that you're a person who has a singular focus on what it is you want to accomplish and that
everything else that we're seeing in the application is pieces of the bigger picture, which is
the story of you, right?
Something about you having a set of passions and goals and interests shaped by your personal
experiences, right?
That's what you're wanting to present, right?
So again, this is not very different from what you would write if you were writing straight
from high school going into a four-year college.
But the content is going to look a little different because you should have something
more substantial to say, given that you've already had some college experience, okay?
You are a few years older, right?
Because you are transferring.
You're not going straight from high school.
So you had a couple years, at least a couple years under your belt, okay?
And you should have, through the range of different classes you've taken, have a clear
picture, right?
A much more detailed sense of the direction you want to go into, right?
And that is what needs to all come out in those personal statements, okay?
You could bring in other things too, right?
Just as everything I've said about personal statements to students who are going straight
from high school, it's the same thing, right?
You should be thinking about exactly the same kinds of questions and doing that sort of
self-reflection to go ahead and figure out who you are.
All of those same things apply.
But the expectation is a little bit different because you are, you should be a little bit
more older, you should have a little more experience, and especially more experience
taking college classes.
You should have learned something during your time in these classes such that it informs
you a bit better about the direction you want to get into.
So the best transfer applications are going to be ones that have this sort of narrative
built into the personal statement, okay?
The reader should have zero questions about the kind of person that you are, right?
They should have a good sense of here's what we can expect and we could trust it.
And in fact, we could trust it more than we would words coming out of a high school student
because this person has been through something, at least some college, to inform their decision,
okay?
They at least know, right?
For instance, they might have tried out through their general education requirements, they
might have tried out other classes and found out that that's not for them.
You should have learned something during your classes that you've explored, okay?
You should have learned something by yourself, your interests and your goals, okay?
That needs to come out, all right?
Everything else, same thing applies, right?
So figuring out whether it's a good fit or not for the college, explaining why it's a
good fit, right?
You'll want to make sure that's in there.
You don't want to repeat any of the things that are found elsewhere in the application.
You merely want to contextualize it, okay?
You want to fill in the dots, create a more vivid picture.
You don't want to just list all your accomplishments, they see it already in your other parts of
your application, there's no need for that, okay?
Does this make sense?
All right.
That said, there's one other thing that also applies that I've also mentioned from students
who are applying straight from high school, right?
Which is part of these personal statements and what needs to be included in there are
any issues with the other parts of your application, right?
For instance, dips in grades, right?
Just because it happened in high school or maybe it didn't happen in high school doesn't
mean it is or isn't going to happen at the college level, right?
The college students face the same thing.
They're people, right?
College students are people.
So they're going to face the same life issues and it's going to impact them in the classroom,
right?
So if there are things in your transcript, and it's going to be important for you again
to reflect, right?
You're not going to necessarily have to submit your high school transcript, but at least
during your time at a community college, right?
You'll want to explain things that might need some explaining.
Let me give you some examples, okay?
It is actually not uncommon for students at community college level to stay at a community
college for a good four, five, six years before they transfer.
And there's a lot of reasons for this, right?
It could be because of financial difficulty.
It could be because of time constraints, because of financial struggles or they have to, they
have a full-time job that they're, you know, that they want to maintain while they go to
school so the schools, they can't take as many classes.
It could be because of some tragedy.
They might have had to take some time off of school for other reasons, family, children,
all kinds of things, right?
I have no idea, okay?
But if there is a gap in your application, that needs to be explained.
Just as it needed to be explained if a high school student had a sudden drop in their
GPA or suddenly took time off of school, right?
These things need to be explained.
And again, it's not a knock on you.
It's not a negative on you at all, right?
It just needs a good explanation so that we get a complete picture of how to understand
the things that you accomplished during this time, right?
So if you went to a community college but then you moved to a different community college,
right, and you move from one to another and they're not anywhere close to one another,
you might want to explain that, right?
If it took you four or five years to finish up the requirements to transfer, you might
want to explain, at least mention why that might be, right?
You don't have to make a whole essay going into detail about exactly what it is, right?
But you do want to at least provide some context for understanding the other parts of your
application, okay?
If you struggled with certain types of classes and then something clicked and all of a sudden
your grades improved, you want to explain that shift, right?
Why is it that you struggle?
Like, why should we downplay the poor grades you got early on and really focus in rather
on your more recent grades?
Something might have happened, right?
There might have been something that was going on in your personal life that somehow shifted.
Maybe you were struggling with mental health and you were finally able to address it really
well.
I've had students in those positions and, you know, people don't like sharing these
things because they feel like, ah, it feels like I'm making excuses for myself or they
feel ashamed about it.
And the one thing I'm stressing to you is no, that's not what this is about.
Fuck your feelings, right?
This is about providing information that the admission committee can use to make an informed
decision.
That's all it is.
They need the information.
They need to know how to understand the letters and the letter grades.
They need something to understand the actual data points that you're sending them, right?
And they're not going to understand it if you don't give them the information.
So you need to give them the information, right?
So what was going on that explains why it is that there was all these sudden changes
in the pattern of classes or number of classes you took or, you know, poor grades or whatever
else it might be, right?
People want to make sure to explain those things, okay?
I think another one that happened quite often was immigration issues of all things, right?
I've had students who had immigration issues, has to do with paperwork, has to do with some
financial stuff associated with it.
Family issues is a fairly common one, right?
Because it's not uncommon for students transferring to have children, for instance, or to be caretakers
of their parents or their grandparents to be primary caretakers of them, right?
There's another one that actually came up at some point, oh, undocumented students having
to deal with immigration issues as a pretty, it's not an uncommon one anyways.
And especially depending on how the government was going about with enforcing some of these
laws and the way they targeted specific groups, it might have impacted some students more
than others, right?
So these are legitimate reasons for why it is that you might have taken some time off
of community colleges or you might have seen a dip in your grades, right?
But then you want to make sure to focus their attention on the fact that, hey, that was
a situational thing that is not reflective of me.
That is because of the situation I was in.
And I've worked to find ways to get myself out of these situations.
And now that I'm in a stable place, my record then shows what I'm actually capable of, right?
That's really what you want to try to get through to the admissions committee, okay?
So I hope this makes sense, right?
The good news about transferring, I think, is that there's a lot more clarity about your
chances of getting in, at least to the public universities, okay?
The numbers and the metrics are a little bit clear.
And that's in part because the grades play such a significant role.
The types of classes you took, whether or not you finished up or are close to finishing
up your general education requirement so that they could expect that you completed, right?
The fact that you finished up your major requirements, right?
The fact that you have a clear sense of direction, right?
The metrics for measuring transfer students are a lot clearer.
So you should be able to make a better educated guess as to your chances of getting in.
In ways where it feels a little bit more like the Wild Wild West when we're talking about
coming straight out of high school, okay?
The metrics are one of multiple factors, but because the metrics, it's not quite clear
how much to trust specific GPAs from a specific school, right?
These things kind of, right, holistic evaluation is kind of fluctuates in terms of whether
you should expect to get into a particular college or not.
The expectation should at least be a lot clearer with community college, okay?
So with that said, that means that you have the information, you should know who to turn
to.
Like I said, constantly be in communication with your academic counselor.
Make sure you go at least once every semester to make sure you're taking the right classes
and that you're on track, okay?
And here's going to be my suggestion, okay?
It'll be a trap if you do not prioritize your education at the community college level.
Like I said, it's not uncommon for a lot of students to stick around at the community
college for four, five, six years, okay?
A lot of the times it's because you're trying to juggle too many things.
Now, sometimes it's inevitable you have no other option.
I understand that and I will support you in any way I can, especially if you're in those
circumstances, okay?
But if you have the option of setting other things aside, right, whether it's social activities
or family obligations, if there's a way to kind of share the burden with others so that
you can focus more on your education, I would highly recommend you do that because there's
a certain kind of trap that happens at the community college level that does not happen
as often at the four-year college.
At four-year colleges, the financial aid package is such that the expectation is that you do
nothing else except focus on your time at the college.
But that's not the case at a community college, which means that a lot of times students are
trying to handle their finances and trying to work in order to make money, in order to
pay for an apartment so that they could attend college, right?
They're doing all kinds of stuff.
If there's a way to just find a way, right, whether it's through good loans, not just
any loan, but good loans, right, with good rates, through support from friends and family,
so that you are unburdened of a lot of additional responsibilities that take you away from your
academics, right, I would recommend that before you start at a community college, you take
a moment to see how much you can do, to do the best you can to unburden yourself with
as many things as possible.
That way, you're more likely to, A, do well in your classes, but B, actually complete
all of your requirements in a timely manner so that you don't stick around for four, five,
six years, okay?
The goal of community colleges have always been get you in and out in two to three years,
but that has not been the case in reality, understandably so.
But I do find that the students who make a conscious effort to try to unburden themselves,
to delete several things in their life that take up time, energy, and resources, and instead
focus on their academics, they're just more likely to finish and also finish in a timely
manner, which in the long run will save you a lot of resources.
You've got to think of it like a long-term investment, right?
You might be taking on a little bit more in terms of financial debt or other things, right,
in your time at a community college, but it also saves you a lot of time and money because
you don't have to be going to community college for five, six years, but instead you could
finish in two to three years, okay?
If you do need some assistance in finding that help, okay, one of the great things about
community college is that because it's so commonplace, there's a lot of resources there
at the financial aid office, in the administration to try to find all the little resources collectively
to make sure that you have all your needs met.
And it might not be ideal, but if it's enough to get you through, then that's the hope because
the hope is to get you in, get you out, so that you could be on your way and pursue the
things that really matter to you in life, right?
That this doesn't become like a stopping point where you just get stuck for years on end,
but rather a jumping off point where we could catapult you to the next stage of your life,
okay?
I hope that information was helpful.
And again, I invite anybody who knows more about community colleges in other states to
chime in.
Leave comments, especially on YouTube.
I will definitely be looking through those and then engaging with whoever is able to
contribute to this discussion.
So I'm really excited for that.
All right.
See you again next time.