 |
| College Entrance exams |
The big thing to remember about
college is that prospective students can begin attending any semester; fall,
spring, or summer.
Getting accepted into college is
no easy task. College admission boards
prefer intelligent, well-rounded students.
While the category percentages may vary, the boards look for good school
grades and/or a high performance on the S.A.T.’s [Scholastic Assessment Tests] as
proof of academic accomplishment. Well-rounded
students probably participated in sports and belonged to clubs in high school. Traditional prospective college students volunteer
their time at churches, hospitals, or community functions.
You know, a person who never
sleeps, has no time for family or friends.
These are tough sneakers to fill for a non-traditional student, a
student over 30 years of age beginning college for the first time.
This was one reason why I started
at a community college or junior colleges as they are sometimes called. Since I was a non-traditional student, with
no S.A.T. scores, I needed to take a basic skills test, an entrance exam, to be
sure I was prepared for college level math and writing.
Okay, so I was only partially prepared
for college, passing the writing portion of the entrance exam, not the math. I didn’t have a college preparatory high
school curriculum. I was a business
student. I haven’t done algebra and
rational numbers and integers, etc., for a long, long time. I required basic skills math courses to bring
me up to college-level math in order to complete the math and science
requirements needed for a college degree.
And that is where my college
journey begins in the memoir: deciding to apply and take the entrance exam at a
community college—with five children in tow for most of it. However, even though I started at a community
college, the possibilities from there were numerous. I’ll discuss some of those possibilities together
with scholarship next month.