SO! How was it?

This experience like many of my others taught me that college life can be very rigorous. The Dorm life and the overall aspect of the program was great! I was very happy to be able to meet new people and form bonds with people that I didn’t know six weeks ago. I felt as if I had all the resources and help that I needed to complete mostly all of my task.
As far as my regular class went, it was defiantly not my favorite. I took American History to 1865, I had professor Griggs. The class itself wasn’t that bad, the material was easy to study, but not easy to remember. I felt for a while that my Professor just told us what he knew, he was never teaching. I also thought that he only knew what he told us and anything extra he was not sure about. He never really elaborated on much, he would talk about things a little and kind of expect you to know or figure out the rest. Once I got the class notes I felt even more like everything the professor was saying was directly out of a book. He made small jokes, but still was not very enthused about the information. The exams were not hard, they were all formatted the same. Overall the class wasn’t that bad the Professor was a great professor but I think that his class should only be taken by upper classmen or Historians.

The "Career shadow"

I have had the opportunity to job shadow before, but since that experience I had a change of career paths so when I get the opportunity to job shadow I would lobe to take it! The job shadow we did on Monday at UNMC was very misleading! This was not at all a career shadow. We went to UNMC and on the way in I thought about the fact that we didn’t sign any HIPPA forms or any forms at all and I wondered what we could possibly be doing. We enter UNMC still with the idea that we may get to career shadow and we are greeted by Sherman. We then waited for the rest of the group and proceeded into a conference room. I figure this is where we will sign legal documents and get on with the shadow. Sherman sits us all down and starts to talk about their programs, some of which we learned about just that morning in panel. I did appreciate learning more about the medical programs; however I was very disappointed because this is not what we were supposed to be doing. We talked for a couple hours and were dismissed before 4 P.M. I felt over dressed and generally cheated out of and experience.

I personally made a statement

Looking at my mom I thought she had the total package. I could dream of a better life, but why do that when the one we have is great. My mother does go through times of struggle but doesn’t everyone? One day my mom told me that I have the ability to do better than she has done, that this is where my BIG dreams begin! If I am going to do better than my mother I have to go to college, become stronger in my faith, and grow to be an outstanding community leader. Watching my mother get laid off and struggling to find a job made me realize that things I want do not come without hard work and dedication. I cannot be average and achieve the goals I have set for myself. I have also realized that maybe if my mother had received higher education she wouldn’t have struggled to find a job. I want to go to college so that I will always have a background of education to fall back on no matter how many jobs I may go through. I understand that jobs may come and go but education is something that no one can take away from me. At times I may have to swallow my pride and let go of some of the things I love, because it will take blood, sweat, and tears to make my dreams reality. I have to be confident in myself and my capabilities.

In my life I am most proud of the responsibilities that I hold. I am proud of myself for having a job and starting that job at the age of fourteen. I work at HYvee on 108th and Fort. I am proud of myself for stepping forward and helping my mom as a single parent so that we will have the money to get me into college. I am also proud of myself for getting this far and not taking drugs or getting pregnant and just keeping my head on straight. I am proud of my hard work in school and staying positive and hard working academically. I am proud of not being in gangs or having run ins with the law. I am proud of keeping my faith and walk with the Lord and still attending church.

The greatest challenges facing students of my race are staying out of gangs, not doing drugs, keeping themselves out of the statistics, not being discriminated against as students, and doing well enough to get into college. A lot of African American students a pressured to be in gangs, a lot of the times if you’re a boy and your not in a gang your not cool and you must be a punk. Gangs make a lot of Afro American boys and girls feel accepted and fill any gaps in their life. If Afro American students aren’t already “cool enough” being in a gang taking drugs may make them feel more accepted. A lot of Afro American students have problems at home, abusive parents, single parent homes, parents on drugs, and ect. Taking drugs may make the student feel better or put off the problems the student is going through at school or at home. A lot of African American boys and girls or just teens have a problem with self esteem or feeling loved, so they turn to a peer or a boyfriend or girlfriend for love. A lot of teens think that in order to love each other you have to have sex, this is what brings in the STD an pregnancy statistics. African American students have trouble staying positive and out of trouble already, and a lot of teachers or grown ups in general look down on African American kids and assume that every one of them will be in a gang or doing drugs or following teen statistics. This can be a big problem for a teen moving up in his/her academic career. One of the last big challenges that I see for kids of my race is getting good grades, scholarships and being in enough extracurricular activities to get a scholarship and get into college successfully.
I would like to go to Tennessee State University because I know that they have a great school of Nursing. I also like the fact that there are high admission requirements so that I know that the school is full of scholarly students. I love the student involvement when I visited the school I got a chance to see a few fraternities and sororities perform in the yard and I was happy to know that it isn’t all about the books. I love the atmosphere of the campus and just the general friendliness of the students and even professors. Last but not least I would like to go to TSU because it is a historically black University and the student success rate is great. I know that when I graduate I will be successful and my school has a great name.

The first look In.

Some of the things we experienced in the first week I have been through before, I have taken college classes before at Metro, and some even here at UNO. Every college experience that I get is somehow different. When I actually get to my freshmen year of college I want to be prepared, being scared should be the least of my worries, my motivation and the reason for entering this program is to learn. I wanted to learn more about myself, college, and last but not least History the class that I am enrolled in. While staying in the dorm for the first week I learned that I am great at being responsible for myself, being an only child it is very easy to take care of myself. What I learned was to help take care of others, I learned to help my roommates with waking up, filling people in with information they may have missed, giving reminders, and just overall being a team and helping each other to make this whole college experience the best that it can be. The most difficult thing to do was keeping everyone on task, I think that this is also something that we all worked together on, sometimes one of us would have to take the lead and say I’m using this free time to study and most of the time others would follow. I learned that I do have self discipline and I can manage my time if I try. Overall this was a great experience and something that will help me greatly on my road to success.