Education
“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.”
- Arnold Edinborough
High School:
High School is the time of life that you really start to define yourself. Parental influence, or control rather, that still held on during your younger teen years starts to wane. You gain the independence you lacked as a pre-teen and young teenager.
I actually did not attend High School in the traditional sense. I was home-schooled. This may evoke thoughts of backwoods school rooms Little House on the Prairie style. This is not the case. My living room was my classroom or, more often, it was my bedroom. I was only required to put in four hours worth of school work daily. I often completed my assignments within two or would work ahead so the next day would be completely free. It was something that I chose to do.
My mother (an elementary educator at the time) was technically listed as my instructor. She went to work. I stayed home. She would help me when I needed assistance and where she could not a tutor was found. My piano lessons counted as a music credit. I took biology, psychology, sociology, and algebra, among other classes at a nearby college.
I had absolute independence during the day. I was free to go to the library, shopping, or the movies, but it was kind of lonely to be honest. I didn't recognize it as loneliness at the time. I was the only one I knew my age who was home during the day that wasn't sick. The college students, while always nice, saw me the same way I now see sixteen and seventeen year olds - as someone often times just as much a child as an adult and with whom I usually have very little in common. It didn't help that I look younger than I am. (I'm in my mid-twenties and people still think I'm eighteen or nineteen.) It's probably for this reason that I spent every morning a local ceramics department was open with a group of really nice old ladies painting useless pieces of ceramic. (I did enjoy painting though.)
College:
I hit college running. I already had college credits and experience. College work is not all that much different from home-schooling. It takes dedication and discipline. No one is there to hold your hand to make you do your work.
The school work is the easy part…finding what you want to do with your life is the hard part. Some people are lucky. They know exactly what they want to do with their lives and go straight for it. Others, like myself, flounder and will try several different majors until they find one that fits.
I’ve changed my major five times - History, Anthropology (Archeology), Criminal Justice, Psychology, Biology/Pre-Med. I even went so far as to change schools (usually dropping out of the old one mid-semester with new-found lack of interest in the subject matter) because another institution had a program that specialized in the field I wanted to go into. I have attended three different four-year institutions. I have more credits than I know what to do with and no degree, other than an Associate's in Science, because they don't fit into any degree program like they should because they are so scattered all across the board.
Between majors, I almost always returned to nursing. It’s both a blessing and a curse because nursing courses fit nowhere other than in nursing – one reason I have so many credits and no degree to show for it.
I am currently a senior level nursing student. I most recently attended a nursing program at a two-year junior college. The program is third in the state for passing rates on the NCLEX-RN and is highly respected by the hospitals. The deciding factor in a recent graduate’s getting a position over another applicant, as she later told me, was where she graduated from. Every year, they get over nine hundred applicants from all across the state and they only accept sixty at most. I feel very fortunate to be there. I will graduate in May of 2010.
I've enjoyed my college experiences. In 2007-2008, I served as the SGA President of the small college I was attending…on top of being a nursing student. It was hectic to say the least.