working title

College

I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I didn’t have a lot of support in my decision. Where I lived, people got a job out of high school (if they finished) in some kind of trade, and they worked in that trade for their whole lives. College was for rich people who had money and time to waste. My parents would often ask me, “What are you going to do with a degree?”

To be perfectly honest, I never had an answer for them, and it’s evident now that I had no idea what I was doing. I picked an English major because I loved to read and had dreams of one day being a best-selling author. I didn’t decide to go to college until I was about 17. My best friend (and future husband) was in his second year of art school, and his life seemed so interesting and glamorous to me. I had never known anyone in college before, and it sounded so foreign, so enticing to me. I thought maybe I should go, too. I mean, what else had I planned to do after college? The thought of getting another part-time job at a fast food restaurant (about all I was qualified to do) was not very exciting, so I thought I’d put off thoughts of what I was going to do for money by just continuing my education. Not that I was a big fan of school, though. As an introvert, I was isolated and ostracized by the general populous.

So against the advice of my parents, I went to my high school guidance counselor and asked for an application to a nearby university. That’s all it took. There was never a discussion of what I wanted to do with a degree or what my plans were. Apparently the only job of my high school’s guidance counselors was to hand out applications to colleges. Were they that hard to get hold of? Hm…

As soon as I decided to go to college, I realized I wasn’t academically prepared for it. Sure, I love reading, but that wasn’t enough. I took typing classes, but that wasn’t enough. I decided to try to get into an advanced placement English class, and I had to lie to get into it. I met with the vice-principal and asked if I could get into the class. He told me I could, as long as I got permission from my current English teacher. I went to her, and she said as long as I got an A in her class, she’d give her permission. Well, I got a very high B, but when the vice-principal asked if I had permission, I said, “Yes,” and it was never questioned.

Okay, it’s wrong to lie. But if I hadn’t lied, I wouldn’t have gotten into AP English, and I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn in order to be prepared for college. And it was evident on my first day in that class that there was no way I’d be prepared if not for that class. We were instructed to read an essay, and then we had to write an essay discussing the literary devices used by the author.

My response was basically, “I don’t know what a literary device is, but I’ll guess.”

Because of that class (where we wrote essays every other day and studied what literary devices were, because apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know), I could keep up with the other freshman English majors when I started college.