By Sara Berry
My path to CCSU has been a long and twisted one.
When I graduated from high school in 2000, the plan was attend the University of Hartford for four years, graduate with a teaching certificate and teach high school history.
In my junior year, I had a field placement where the main thing I learned was that most high school students are evil and that I did not want to spend the rest of my working life trapped in a classroom with 30 of them. So I changed my major to history and worked towards my history degree while exploring other options.
I first vaguely considered social work before deciding to apply to pharmacy school. Since I was a history major, I hadn’t taken a math or science class in quite a long time, so I decided that community college would be a good place to take the prerequisites for pharmacy school and doing it there would be much more cheaper than at a school like UConn.
While at Manchester Community College, I discovered that chemistry, calculus and especially anatomy and physiology did not work in my history major’s brain. After learning that UConnwas not accepting transfer students into the pharmacy program around the same time I realized I wasn’t going to get in even if they did take transfers, I decided I would take whatever MCC had to offer that looked interesting and go from there.
It took a while (six years total) for me to figure it out and graduate with an associate degree. About three years into my time at MCC, I found myself in a human services class, and it seemed to fit. I finally had a new plan, and graduation was in sight.
But something was missing. As much as I loved MCC, something wasn’t quite right. As I was planning my classes for my final year at MCC, I realized what it was, and that it had been missing at UHart, too. Even though I didn’t actually finish my history degree, I went to graduation. During the ceremony, I remember feeling disconnected from my classmates. In my time at UHart, I was a commuter who worked full time and took classes full time, and I had very little social life while I was there.
As I was looking towards graduation from MCC, I realized that I felt the same way, and I vowed to do something about it. Around the same time, a new issue of the Live Wire, the MCC student newspaper came out. That was it. I had always loved to write and I was the editor of the middle school paper in eighth grade. My high school didn’t have a newspaper and although I had initially wanted to write for the paper at UHart, I had class during the meetings my freshman year and never ended up getting involved. To make a long story somewhat shorter, I got involved in the Live Wire and served as editor my last year at MCC.
As I was moving towards graduation, I had to decide what my next step would be. There were lots of things that I liked doing and lots of things that I was interested in. I am one of those people who loves to learn anything and everything, but simply learning about everything was not going to get me a job. I had to decide where to go from MCC and what area I was going to go into.
Over the years I spent at MCC, I took a number of psychology classes there, which fascinated me. I was even unanimously chosen to receive the first psychology department award. That award, and one very supportive and influential psychology professor, pointed me in the direction that I am now headed: to be a psychology major and a journalism minor. Psychology was something I was interested in and could see myself having a job in, and writing was something I had a passion for. One day, my favorite psychology professor said “You could write articles about psychology.” And there it was, a way to combine two of the things that I was most interested in.
Several of my close friends were looking at transferring to CCSU, so I looked into it as well. By virtue of CCSU being the only nearby school I could afford, here I am. I have found a home with the psychology department and The Recorder staff. I still didn’t really know what job I will end up with, but I now have a direction. While my school journey is far from over and the end seems to be off in the distance, I know that I will find it with the help of a few special people who have helped me come this far.