I have decided to go to community college to acquire a degree, starting in January 2024, despite my past reluctance to participate in conventional education. Life-changing decisions aside, the enrollment experience has been more difficult than it needed to be, seemingly at every turn.
I had ordered my high school transcript three separate times – the first time, I had it sent to me, but in order for colleges to take transcripts, it has to go straight from the high school to the college. That’s fair enough, I though, so I went to order it again, but directly to the college. However, for weeks on end, my college account still had the transcript hold on it. After many calls and trying to figure out who to talk to, I found out that I had ordered the transcript incorrectly. I was not notified of this, and the only way I could have known was by checking my credit card statement and seeing that the charge had been refunded. Apparently the way I ordered it was for if I was a representative of a school or business, but as an incoming student I had to order it as a student, but have it sent to the college. The form was rather confusing.
Anyways, the third order I did correctly, and that was it for the transcript.
Then I had to take the TSI. Or rather, I had to find out if I had to, because there were exemptions available. I remember taking the SAT, but I didn’t remember my scores. I couldn’t access them without remembering my CollegeBoard account. However, I discovered that the method to reset your CollegeBoard password has simply not worked for months (see this reddit thread). However, also in that thread, there was a different recommendation:
Comment
byu/Character_Society_18 from discussion
inApplyingToCollege
So I did that, and after a few days I got an email that my accounts had been merged. I was now able to view my SAT score. It turned out to not be high enough to be exempt (which I half-expected, as I remember refusing to take the SAT seriously as it had no bearing on my actual grades in high school, and I didn’t plan on going to college at the time).
So then I had to take the TSI at the testing center at my community college. This went mostly fine, but the testing software has some strict cheat-detection, and I have a tendency to click on the taskbar when looking at the screen after having looked away (which I had been doing to solve the math problems on the provided scratch paper). I had to explain to the test proctor that it was an accidental click outside of the window. I don’t know why the window wasn’t just fullscreen. I got a good score at least, so there’s that.
So I was finally able to start enrolling for classes, which was straightforward enough. I got a list of classes I needed to enroll in for my degree plan. However, I unknowingly enrolled in a 3-week “wintermester” class for College Algebra.
I was later informed at orientation that I really should not take a wintermester class as a first time college student. I had to speak to an advisor to change my College Algebra time to be in the actual Spring 2024 semester, but by this point the only available section was in the mornings on days that I originally only planned to go to the school at night (6-9pm). Oh well. I would rather take 16 weeks of College Algebra at night than trying to cram 16 weeks of instruction into 3 weeks of online class (which, yes, is what the “wintermester” is).
Despite all of that, I’m as ready as I can be for continuing my education. I’m a little excited. The degree plan is 2.5 years. I hope to be able to get a half-decent job in programming after I complete my time there.