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Maxwell Pitney

Deby Jizi

UWRT 1103-030

5 February 2018

Community College

My junior year of high school I decided to enroll in classes at my local community

college, CPCC. I wasn’t completely sure it would be a good thing for me, but I was ready to

jump into the next step of life and get some classes at college done. I was quite nervous, but also

excited because I knew I would learn a lot. Most of my friends thought I was crazy, thinking the

classes would be much harder than normal high school classes. I didn’t think of this as an

obstacle, I thought of it as a challenge. I learned early on that there is a clear difference between

a class having more work and it being difficult. The classes at CPCC were harder to comprehend,

but the work that was assigned was very specifically picked to help us practice. I felt like I was

actively learned every time I went to class, and completing the homework only strengthened my

knowledge of the subject.

I experience this in all of the classes I took at CPCC. This ended up really improving my

work ethic because I was interested in the work we had to do. I wanted to do better in the class

and the teacher was actually giving relevant material to help us, unlike my high school classes.

When I did do the work, I could directly see my grades improving and that only motivated me

more to do better. I believe if I stayed in high school classes, I really wouldn’t have been ready

for school here at UNCC. The other major thing that helped was having a great professor.

At my high school, many of my teachers were lazier than we were as students. Work

wasn’t there to help us, it was there so they didn’t have to teach. The worst part was when you
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needed help, most of the time it never came. From the first day at CPCC, I could tell it was going

to be different. Of course, there are subpar teachers everywhere, but just simply being in the

different environment with much more mature people always seemed to lead to a better class

experience. My teachers were genuinely supportive at CPCC and I knew I could count on them

when I needed help.

This better class experience actually led to me really finding my passion. Throughout

middle school and high school, I usually had decent math classes, but never one that really

sparked my interest. The first class I took at CPCC was a math class, and halfway through the

course I already knew I loved math. After a few years of taking math classes I was sure I wanted

to do something involving math and that’s how I ended up in first engineering and now

mathematics.