Commentary
I came to Ohio via New Mexico and California. I’m a western man. The economic shift of 2008 caused a layoff at the copper mines around Silver City N.M. and in January 2009 I was laid off a foreman’s job I held in a company I thought I would retire from. After which, I worked as a cowboy for some ranching concerns in southeast New Mexico.This drew on skills of my youth gained growing up in rural coastal California.
I was at a crossroad. I hold a commercial driver’s license and had driven a truck a great deal in California before taking on the heavy construction of mining in New Mexico. I have held a mine safety and health administration certification as well as hydraulic crane certification in New Mexico. The cowboy work was a catchall to keep busy, but the desert was harsh country and despite its beauty, I was not going to grow old in the desert pushing cows.
The opportunity came up to go to school. The layoff at the mine was due to foreign copper prices and a letter informed me that I qualified for trade adjustment assistance. An associate’s degree from college attracted me. I had a GED, but did not celebrate graduation from high school. So I loaded up the horses, dog and cat and headed to Ohio to live with my sister and go to school.
I went through the Adult Basic Literacy Education program offered by Warren County One Stop and in spring 2011, I started at Sinclair Community College with the idea of getting a degree in Communication. It had been 35 years since I was in school and I was a bit apprehensive to start.
My apprehension was well founded, school proved to be a challenge from the start. My first hurdle was an Introduction to Word, PowerPoint and Excel class. By the third lecture meeting, I was overwhelmed. I chose to withdraw from the class with a refund. In the beginning, I felt overwhelmed by college most of the time. I was surrounded by bright, energetic and motivated young people. I felt both out of place and out of style.
I studied hard and made the dean’s list the first two quarters. Even though I earned B’s in developmental math and beginning algebra, I had great concerns going into intermediate algebra. They were concerns well founded, as I joined the 53 percent of students that failed the class. Not once, but twice. Two quarters with a bomb in math. I held good marks in my other classes and enjoyed them for the most part.
In hindsight, I would say that I should have taken the Student Success class earlier. The class is dismissed by many of the students, but I found it held good information on academic reading, note taking and time management that would have been helpful those first quarters. I was back on the dean’s list for spring and summer quarters.
Fall 2012 came along and I started into the focus of my Communication major, Multimedia Journalism. I took a design class as required and got thoroughly worked over by the class and the new operating systems to learn. I was working with Macs while I was still just getting comfortable with Windows. It was like immersion training in the Adobe Web Design programs and I was operating with a deficit from day one. It was all I could do to pull a “C” out of the class. I knew that Multimedia Journalism was not my desire.
I came to school to learn Communication, to learn writing with a schooled pen and to learn critical thinking. I did not want to pursue a career as a journalist and had no love for the design class, so I acted on Instructor Sandy Hilt’s advice and got an appointment with an academic adviser. I have some options to redirect my major and could conceivably attain my degree after completing four more classes in summer.
That’s what I want, the degree. Not a job or career. I want something to show for the two plus years of work here at Sinclair. I want to experience what I never did in high school. I want to graduate, to wear the cap and gown and to receive my degree with a handshake. I want my family to be proud of me and I’d like to feel a bit of that pride myself. Then I’ll take that degree and add it to the other marketable skills I have and get back into the working world.