I’d like to warn everyone contemplating attending Essex County College in Newark, NJ or West Caldwell, NJ, it’s quite possibly the WORST school you could possibly enroll in. Of course, that’s only MY opinion based on MY personal experience.
My experiences there were borderline terrifying. In many classes I heard classmates greet “professors” with the following salutation, “Whassup my nigga?” (more…)
The first class I took during Summer Session I was World Civilization I. The instructor was an attorney from Paterson I’ll call Ronnie. I’ll call him Ronnie since he often referred to himself in the third person as “Ronnie”. He sort of had this “Supafly Soul Brotha” vibe to him. He had relaxed hair, and wore a ginormous shiny gold chain around his neck. I swear sometimes I think I saw him take off a crushed velvet hat with a peacock feather in it before class. (more…)
After I made the hasty decision to go back to college, I needed to decide where exactly I wanted to go. Since most admission departments are dealing with people who take care and patience deciding where they want to go in the last two years of high school, sending in a college application in April wouldn’t alow me to attend summer session classes anywhere. I didn’t have high school transcripts, letters of reference, SAT scores, nada, zip, nothing. (more…)
Let me be honest, my decision to go back to college grew more out of spite and sloth than a desire for personal fulfillment. I had recently quit my low paying go nowhere job and was receiving unemployment. As an added bonus from NJ state taxpayers, I qualified for an additional benefit called Tuition Reimbursement; a social program so progressive it would make FDR jump for joy.
If you were unemployed, you were excused from seeking re-employment if you attended college classes full time. Since I was fully prepared to take the summer off, I wanted to appear as if I were busy. Plus, I also enjoy being an egghead, as much I have the capacity to anyway, so my general lack of ambition and state bureaucracy got married and had a baby in my brain.
For those of you not familiar with this fine film, I suggest you netflix it as soon as possible. In a nutshell, Rita is a frustrated hairdresser, unhappy with her unfulfilled life and starts attending college classes. Rather, she starts attending university because Rita is British and they speak classier than Americans.
She is met with judgment and resistance from her working class family and friends. I used this film as a comparison to my own late in life collegiate experience.
Like most facets of my life, I’m a little late in starting this project. I would like to use this blog to chronicle my experience as a degree seeking college student in my late 30’s. Unfortunately, I’ve been taking classes for about a year and a half so I’ve missed the boat on the day to day chronicles, but seeing as my graduation date is several years away, there should be plenty of details left.
