I gotta lock in during ENGR 122 fr
Written on April 1st , 2024 by Anthony Ponce
I just started English 100.
I am looking forward to finally getting this class complete and hope to get an A in the process to really put a fork in it. For context, I took this class three times at Santa Ana College. I dropped out all three times. I was an eighteen year old the first two times I dropped out and twenty-one the third time. I used to register for classes with no direction but always took English freshman composition because, even though I did not know much, I did know that was a requirement for graduation. But what happens when you just take classes with no real intention of completing it? You tank your GPA and SAP and lose your FASFA in the process.
The third time I attempted it I had to get a wavier from SAC to take it. They told me over the phone I was on my last strike. I was trying to go back to school at twenty-one. I thought I was mature enough to finally do it. It was during the COVID pandemic and it was all online. I have no real confidence or even proven history at the collegiate level and here I was trying to do English 100 online. To this point I really only had Ws and two Fs on my transcript. I am not joking. I was so ashamed and embarrassed about this. I had gone from being tested for GATE when I was a child, being in Honor band, AP classes the whole nine yards to being a total academic burnout.
It got to me. It ate at my core. I felt resentful. I was depressed and felt like a failure. Every time I was in a zoom call I just had major imposter syndrome. One day I just couldn’t take it, I left the zoom call early one day because he put us into a break out room for the hundredth and he took it as a major slight so he removed me from the class. I got an email about five minutes later saying I was dropped. To this day I don’t think it was very fair of him to do that. I was not a repeat offender. I wasn’t consistently leaving early, this was just a professor who took offense to me leaving his terrible lecture.
You can call that an disrespectful take and I agree. I am just painting a picture. I was hard headed and difficult. I didn’t even realize it but I was having a panic attack and I wanted to leave.I failed English so many times that I couldn’t take English100 at Santa Ana College ever again. It was three strikes and I was out. I didn’t think I even needed school anymore. I thought I was just doing it to do it. I was a manufacturing supervisor at the company I worked for by this time and I was making a decent living. I rejected the school system as it felt like a bunch of filler classes with kids who didn’t even want to be there.
It was total projection on my part. It is so obvious looking back. I was the literally yelling at myself with that take. I was the kid who was taking classes aimlessly and just did not want to be there. So, I just stopped pretending I wanted to be there.
I left college again for a whole calendar year. I changed jobs, went through an ugly breakup at the time, injured my meniscus so bad it clicks on command to this day and realized for all my work experience, all I had to my name was just that. My name and my word. I needed a viable way to prove the skills I learned at work so I began to consider school again.
I moved onto work at Nike during this time and the average age of my coworker was about mid 20s. I would talk to somebody and the conversation would quickly turn into school. I was a drop out. An arrogant one at that. I never felt incapable, I just lacked discipline. But who has time for all that? Those are just excuses.
You get one chance to make an impression. If they ask you where you go to school and you say you don’t, the conversation is over. You immediately were looked at as uneducated. You can read all the books in the world Anthony, nobody cares in the world we live in. You have to have that degree in this day and age. It didn’t matter what I had done before. It didn’t matter that you showed so much “potential”, you didn’t do anything with it man.
What the hell was going on? Why did I care so much? The social pressure was just building.
Eventually, I was so embarrassed to tell the truth I began to lie about taking a break from my school. I can remember one time my coworker asked how many credits I had when I stopped and I said some stupid number like 8 and he was like oh you didn’t even do anything huh? I lied and said I meant 18 and just stuttered. He kinda shrugged and was content to accept that answer. I didn’t realize that it was only like 3 more classes than I first mentioned because I had no idea what the hell I was even talking about!
Spring 2022, I had been at Nike for almost a year and I finally registered for a single class. That is it. One class, Intro to Electronic Media, got a C. I didn’t do one discussion at the very end of my class that could have put up to a B.
I think about that all the time now. I had no excuse not to get an A in that class.
Eventually I got it all together and began to take my courses seriously. I am proud to say I hold a 3.63 GPA currently at Santa Ana College now and am on track to graduate this June with an Associate of Science degree in Mechatronics Engineering something I really never imagined myself getting. I made honors for the first time ever last semester and it doesn’t feel real.
