Welcome to Community College

I arrived to the community college class brandishing a dull gray sweater, which seemed to echo the sentiments of my new classmates. The flourescent bulbs cast an unsettling light on everyone's frowning faces. The students shuffled in their seats, sifted through the bags, and remained remarkably silent. Not one student acknowledged another, implying that they all were painfully shy or complete strangers. My high school, where I took classes during the day, was never quiet, especially right before class began. The only louder periods during the day were lunch and gym. But right before the bell rang, papers exchanged hands, lips fluttered with the fervency of blinking eyelashes, and the zipping and unzipping of backpacks filled the air as hands groped for textbooks. Suddenly I missed those sounds, as frantic as my school's Darwinian environment made me. My eyes scanned the classroom in hopes of finding a familiar face. Not one stood out to me. I took a seat and waited for the teacher to arrive.

The professor sat down, straightened his back, and barely greeted himself before taking role. He went through each name, careful to stress the correct syllables, and asking for clarification when he wasn't sure how to pronounce a foreign appellation. Just as professionally, the old man began to distribute the syllabus. He smiled lightly and introduced the course, not in a bored tone but not with informercial enthusiasm, either. The polo shirt and stiff khakis he wore brought out his natural reservation, but his occasional joke established that he was not a humorless man. In other words, he was professional. In other words, the community college professor surprised my inner-snob.

Like most Yorktown High School students, I sneered at Northern Virginia Community College. We Arlingtonians may claim to be progressive, but like most white liberals, our chant for change is hollower than we'd like to admit. We may vote Democrat but we still feel entitled to la creme de la creme. If--God forbid!--a student earned a C in one of his classes, his comrades would probably snicker, "Hey, you can always go to NOVA," as if attending a community college was the biggest personal disaster possible.

I was used to harsh competition in a place where GPAs, course loads, extracurricular activities, and standardized test scores seemed to determine a seventeen year-old's destiny. Nearly everyone fretted about getting into a highly-rated college or university--if not one of the Ivies or a hoity-toity liberal arts school, then certainly an excellent art school (Parsons, SVA, SCAD, NYU, RISD, VCU Arts, etc.) or highly rated public university (William and Mary, UVA, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, U. Wisconsin-Madison, etc.) Going to NOVA meant failure by those standards.

Except in my case. Attending one of the top public high schools in America did nothing but elevate my nervous tendencies. For a time I was paranoid about not getting into a college worthy of bourgeois recognition. So, in order to make myself more competitive for college admissions, I took seventeen credits at NOVA before I graduated from high school. I knew how many of my classmates went on mission trips to South America, how many were on varsity sports teams, how many earned such and such award at regional and national levels. Afraid that my achievements in art and writing would not distinguish me enough from my peers, I signed up for Pre-Calculus, Calculus, World Literature I, World Literature II, and Arabic I at NOVA. Thankfully, those dual-enrollment changed my whole mentality about higher-education.

I saw that quality professors exist at every institution, whether at a community college or a prestigious four-year school. In fact, one of my best literature teachers of all time taught at NOVA and by far my least favorite taught at the elite Grinnell College. But NOVA surprised me in other ways, as well. I witnessed diligent, inquisitive students ask my professors insightful questions and relate their relevant personal experiences to class material. At NOVA, the student body consisted of people from all ages, races, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. I studied alongside both people with vast academic experience who were simply working towards an additional degree as well as people who had barely graduated from high school in developing countries. Their backstories extended far beyond the sequence of events the majority of coddled suburban Washingtonians at my high school had lived. Most NOVA students were people who knew about a life beyond SAT tutoring, rampant house parties, visiting college campuses on family vacations, lounging at summer beach houses, and taking field trips to the Smithsonian. They had birthed and raised children of their own; escaped from wars; and worked embarrassing and demeaning jobs to get to where they were on that day when I, a high school junior, first walked into the classroom. What did I know about their tragic adventures other than what I had read in Newsweek and The Washington Post?

One day, in one of my literature classes, a Lebanese classmate gave a presentation on her homeland. It was during the zenith of the July War between Israel and Lebanon. She stood quivering in her pastel hijab as she described the customs of country, the Lebanese alphabet and dialect, and how she had lived her life as a Muslim woman there. Most of her family was still in Lebanon, attempting to survive under conditions that my imagination was too narrow to picture. As her eyes began to mist, I sighed and realized that the woman could have not been more than twenty-one years old. There she was, moon-faced and beautifully innocent looking, and yet even though she wore the beaming face of precocious child, she had lived in one summer what it would likely take me decades to experience.

Suddenly, after taking classes at NOVA, the name-brand obsession that plagued my high school began to irk me. I started to realize that Top Twenty lists provide very superficial assessments of schools in general. Mostly, schools are ranked by the size of their endowments and the accomplishments of their professors. They tell you where the rich and privileged attend, not the sweating, working class who could tell you first-hand what William Carlos Williams and Dorothea Lang portray in their respective writing and photography. I became fully aware of just how arrogant my classmates and I were to ever discount NOVA and its wealth of knowledge and resources. Attending classes there is like witnessing the drama of classic Russian literature.

Despite the unusual glimpse into another world that NOVA provided me, I did not attend NOVA after graduating from Yorktown but I certainly held it in much higher regard than previously. I toned down my worry about getting into an elite school. I concentrated more on the joy of learning and less so about accomplishing a high GPA. And I never forgot where the poignancy of the human condition became most tangible for me.