Nelson Akintola

Mouctar Dia

8 February 2024

Tough transition from high school to college.

 

In life we will always come across problems. It’s okay to not be okay. Is not okay to stay that way. I have been in a variety of tough situations before but unlike others this one is unique, reason being this is a new ground for me where I must do everything for myself. This is the story of how I almost gave up because of how much paperwork goes into getting into CCNY and the amount of information I must absorb, it took me 4 meetings with advisors to finally schedule a class and that’s before attending the classes.

It started off in the summer of 2023 where the excitement of being a graduate is still fresh and I was enjoying my summer with family at NJ, around the end of July I started to look into my CUNY portal where they were about four missing items that I haven’t submitted to the admissions office yet and worst of all I forgot to schedule an advising appointment in order to schedule classes. One of the most important items that I had missing was my transcript, in my knowledge usually the school that you graduated from is supposed to send it to the school that you are going to and what end up happening was I must go to my old school request my final transcript to transfer it to my new school. The next most important thing that I thought I did but I didn’t do is my medicals. The good thing was I had a physical already, so I didn’t have to do a new one, so I ended up submitting the physical the same day I submitted my transcript. The third Item I forgot to resubmit was my TAP missing information, specifically my dad’s SSN number and signature which could have been catastrophic If I haven’t know about that at that point, I could have paid almost $3,000 out of my pocket for that semester alone, luckily, I finished on time and ended up paying zero dollars. The fourth and last item that I had missing was my advising appointment, although not as serious as the other items nonetheless I made appointments through navigate however one issue that I ended up having with the appointment is that the advisor cancelled last minute, I did another one that one I was late for 15 minutes, I did the third one which ended up being disaster since they were a lot of people at the time with the same advisor, after all of that I finally schedule an advising without getting any issues and I ended up scheduling my classes.

In conclusion, act because you won’t regret it, and always be optimistic about the future. If anything, what I learned through this is to not panic or think you are the only student going through this and make sure you act.