Revised Changes Essay

Albert Dennie
Eng201 A 1-2:50
9/13/2008

College Success = Success in Life

I’ve been out of school for five years and have worked on and off at various retail stores as well as warehouses. I was seventeen then and not sure what I wanted to do with my life. Five years later, I know this is not it!

One evening I was sitting in the living room watching TV. And this Everest College comes on the screen yelling “get off the couch and call xyz…” So I got off the couch and went to my computer and applied for admissions to the nearest college which, happened to be the College of Alameda. This was early august 2008. The college sent me an email confirmation upon my approval for admittance a day later. After that, I was advised to schedule an Assessment Exam to see what I remembered and didn’t from five years ago. I was kind of tensed but this wasn’t a pass or fail test. When I got my results I walked over to the counselor’s bunker where I spoke with a counselor who referred me to Brenda Bias, one of the teacher’s in the Transformative Learning Center, Sspire. She told me that the program would required that I maintain no lower than a C-average and above, and participate in college tours, information sessions pertaining to colleges, writing classes and other activities I need to obtain a four year degree.

College can help people make better decisions by broadening their minds to things unknown. A way I think college can help is by getting to students to open a book and “read between the lines (Adler 376)”. In “How to Mark a Book scholar Mortimer Adler points out that students need to “annotate” when we are reading and for a better understanding. So far college is helping me pay attention to words I did not know. I have picked up Tupac Shakur’s Holler If You Hear Me and I have read into it and got an understanding before it was assigned in class to read.

The first step in my transformation was leaving the TV. alone. Before the Everest College experience, I’d already felt that my mind needed to be nourished with knowledge. I felt like I didn’t know a lot of words and I needed to know the meaning and how to use them in context. I wanted a better job of course; I had to get more education. I believe that now that I am older I need education the most. I need education for a better understanding on life.