I remember my first week at my university. I was a freshman in college, 18, and an English major. I grew up in a single parent household, with two older sisters. No one in my immediate family had been to a university. My oldest sister had been to culinary school, but she commuted, and her experience was different. She also did not talk about her experience about regularly with me as we have an 8-year age gap. I loved to learn, but in high school I struggle to care about going to college. My mom didn’t encourage us to go to college; her phrase she would use was that college is not for everyone.
I had no desire to go to college, let alone a university, but I had a supportive English teacher that would not let up on my potential. My freshman English teacher is the one who helped me see my potential and believe in myself. She helped me realized that education was not only important, but a way out of living in the unhealthy conditions that I was growing up in. I went from a elementary reading levels to a collegiate reading level my first semester of freshman year of high school because my teacher helped me find my passion for English. She helped remind me of how much I loved literature and writing. I cared and showed my potential through taking my class seriously and putting forth real effort in testing.
My first week of college I left my last class that Friday, which was a creative writing class, and I remember going back to my dorm and bursting in to tears. I felt so out of place. I felt unprepared, uneducated, like a total failure. My professors all were speaking at a level of professionalism that I could not comprehend. My peers were engaging and giving very insightful responses from prior knowledge that I did not have at all in me. They were using words I had never even heard before like dichotomy, romanticism, ghazal poetry, Shakespeare, etc. I feel my high school did not prepare me as I knew many of my peers that had read books that were read amongst many of my peers in college like Faren height 451, Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, Phantom of the Opera, etc. However, each of these books were read only in our honors classes in high school.
I quickly realized and told myself that in order to be able to make it through my degree, but especially through these English specific classes, I was going to have to put in the work. I was not afraid to ask my professors for help, Google search and dictionaries became my best friends. The more I took the time to educate myself, mostly privately because I was afraid of others knowing how uneducated I was in the field, the more confident I became in the classroom. My hard work thankfully paid off, and I received that English Literature Degree with a minor in Creative Writing.
I encourage anyone and everyone to never count yourself out. If you don’t know something, teach yourself. We have a plethora of resources to utilize. Do not live in fear of yourself or your inner doubt. I found using Google, YouTube, dictionaries (physical copies or online), and even using websites like Khan Academy to be helpful in improving my level of knowledge and vocabulary. Never count yourself out.
Escaping Reality and looking within 