Listening 34 – Listen for specific words

Both of my parents have graduated with their associate degree, so it was really for me to graduate with my bachelor’s degree at least. So right out of high school I went to the University of Cincinnati, but I only made it about two semesters there before I gave up. I can’t recall why, but I just that it wasn’t for me to be there.

I went on about, working some jobs, and then eventually I enrolled into a trade school for TV and – but I still always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to graduate from college, and I’d the statistic about if you didn’t go to college right outside of high school, then you probably wouldn’t go back. So I was to beat that statistic.

So eventually in 2005 I enrolled at a college called the College of Mount Saint Joseph. Since I had been out of school for a couple of years at that point, it was a change. I really enjoyed doing the work, and I actually joined to major in computer science – and I did pretty well for a couple of semesters. But then I had some very difficult personal arise and my grades suffered severely. I failed a couple of classes and I nearly failed a few more.

I was about ready to just give up and throw in the towel, but I was determined to see this through, and so I what I wanted to do in college. I ended up changing my major over to communications. I was still overwhelmed with the of completing it – I still had three years at that point. So what I decided to do was just kind of take everything one semester at a time, not focus on the long-term goal of , but focusing instead on the smaller short-term goals, giving myself these milestones to reach.

Some classes were extremely boring to me, but I had a lot of classes that were a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed my creative classes and any opportunity where I had the chance to just use my imagination. I used the classes that I enjoyed to help me get the classes that I didn’t enjoy.

It was a lot of hard work, there were a lot of sleepless nights, there were a lot of times when I procrastinated way too much and fell , but I stuck with it. I didn’t let the hard times get me . I kept my eye on the milestones and the goals that I had set for myself.

Eventually I got to my senior , it was the last semester of school. And we had our biggest project – we had to use everything that we had learned up until that point and put it into a big presentation for the class. And I was so very nervous. I really do enjoy getting up in front of people and speaking, but the moments leading up to that are very for me.

So I did what I do best, and I used my and I made this project as fun as I possibly could. I talked about the benefits of YouTube and its applications in the learning at the college. I met all of the scholastic requirements but I tried to make it as much fun as I could. And everybody it, it was a great presentation.

And in May of 2008 I graduated from the College of Mount Saint Joseph with my bachelor’s in communications. I was so happy to have finally accomplished the goal. It was such a long – I beat that statistic. I’m really happy that I can look back over my life and say that I went to college and I finished.