Take advantage of your education

It doesn’t matter if this is our first semester or seventh, we can’t help but to wonder: have we taken advantage of our education? Did we give enough aspiration to our studies?

With our whole life ahead and awaiting in college we have to look at ourselves for a moment and think about that question again: Have we taken advantage of our education?

In the United States we are lucky to have an opportunity to have an education. Some other countries like Asia, Africa and Latin America have school aged children that cannot go to school and these countries have a very low literacy rate, less than 20 percent. The United States has a literacy rate of 95 percent.

Countries like these are often faced with challenges economically and cannot provide better schools for children. Some children in other countries don’t have a chance to choose which school they want to attend.

This is why we cannot take our education for granted; we have a free opportunity on education so we can pursue a better life. We believe that as Citrus College students we can take advantage of our education in numerous ways.
So lets start with a checklist: Have you shown up to class regularly? Have you talked to your professors about test question you got wrong? Did you even look inside your $100 textbook? In a class where the subject didn’t interest you did you keep an open mind? Have we ever pursued to get help from other students who understand the material better?

If you answered no to any of these then you are not taking advantage of your education.

 So take the time to be more engaged in your classes. We have to take on the opportunities given such as, participating, asking questions, getting the help we need and building relationships with our professors.

Professors are the best untapped resource on this campus and they have a lot of knowledge to offer. So see your professors during their office hours and discuss some confusing material that you didn’t get the first time around. In addition to this look into the services provided at Citrus like the workshops and tutors.

All these are available at our convenience while they are not available in other countries.

Now in a college with more than 20,000 students, it can be difficult to get the classes we want. We have all been there before but rather than to hate the course, try to have an open mind and see what you can get out of it, even if it’s something small.
Latin America would jump at the opportunity for free education, so we shouldn’t complain that we are in a class we dislike, because others don’t have the opportunity for children and adults to experience a wide variety of education.

It was once said before “You get out of life what you put into it.” We feel this is very true when it comes to education. When approaching an educational obstacle look at it with an open mind and do the work to gain a skill. Do not approach it saying, “this information is completely useless to me.  I’m not gaining anything from it.”

At Citrus we have general education courses to see how valuable basic skills can be. General education courses range from subjects like speech, science, math and history. These courses are required to transfer and/or get an associate degree.

These are basic skills that we can learn, but some underprivileged students in areas like Mozambique, Africa may be lacking because of matriculation fees that puts a burden on families under the poverty line.

So we can’t take our oral and written communication skill classes for granted because with them we can learn to communicate and express our ideas. These are valuable to us because when we make a presentation for a job promotion or making a toast at a future wedding. We can use the techniques that we accumulated throughout these courses.

A subject like science is just as important as any other. It gives us statistics and knowledge that someone research so we know how our body and chemistry works.

Even math is just as important. Even though it may seem like the information will be useless to us, what we learn isn’t. When we write checks and pay bills we have to add and subtract our money to make sure we aren’t overdrawn. If we want to cook a scrumptious cake we have to use fractions and measurements to follow the recipe. We can even use probability to bet on a horse that has the best chance of winning.

If you aren’t doing any of these things then you’re definitely not taking advantage of your education. Other countries would love the chance to have it and we should be grateful we have the opportunity others do not have.

It might seem overwhelming to make use of all the opportunities, but our preparation is important and the knowledge we gain is something that cannot be taken away; it’s the golden key that unlocks endless doors of opportunities.