I finally made it to college. Since I was half way through high school when I found out I had Dyslexia my Grade Point Average was horrible and getting accepted to a big university was out of the question. Taking any standardized test was pointless. That means the SAT's or college placement test were going to be bombed. I landed myself in the local community college and failed their placement test. I had to retake a ton of classes just to get up to their standard of college classes. That made me feel really smart, let me tell you. I was 18 years old and had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or what I wanted to major in. I was really good at art in high school. I decided on art in college, my first semester was horrible. I had the worst English professor, the guy was a real jerk. After that semester I felt kind of defeated and didn't try as hard in the next few semesters. My grades started to drop as my classes got harder. The history classes were really really hard mainly because of the amount of reading required in such a short time frame. It was a Tuesday and Thursday class, Tuesday would require you to read 20-30 pages in day an half. It didn't take me too long to get completely behind and failing the class. It didn't help that I ran into another professor that did not care for my style of art and would fail me on each project. The last project was a crime scene. I made a dead body out of trash bags, with old clothes in it to shape the body and used red paint for the blood. I used a toy gun as the murder weapon. The professor saw I used a toy gun and tried to get me kicked out of school. She claimed it was real and after showing her repeatedly it was just plastic and a toy, she dropped it. I transferred out of the Art department.
I decided on Criminal Justice. What was I thinking, really? My grades were okay but not great. A friend of the family recommended me applying for a local job in law enforcement. After tons of interviews and background checks and months of waiting I got the job. I decided to leave college without getting my degree. That was a really dump decision. I worked in law enforcement for almost five years. I hated my job. The supervisors were complete jerks and on a power trip. There was a lot of dirty behavior in plain view. On a pure ethics point of view it wasn't for me. I was promised a lot of things when I was hired. Nothing happened. They just lied and didn't honor anything they said. I asked to go back to college and work a shift that would help with that. I ended up losing my job over it. The only good thing that came out of it was it allowed me to buy my first house at 22 years old and put money in stock "google" to be exact. After working five years I had roughly 22,000 dollars in my retirement account which helped pay for some house updates and my college.
Since I have been back in college I have made A's and B's. My GPA last semester was 3.8 the highest I have ever had. Just because I have Dyslexia doesn't mean you can not do College. I'll be honest I hit a lot of "walls" in college and took a lot of classes I just couldn't hack it. I have had a lot of people that took the time to help me and on the other hand I have had some really crappy people too. I have a lot of drive to push on. I have been told most of my life I could not do it. I wouldn't get through high school and college was not possible for me. I will be the only child of my parents that has a degree from college. That is even more push to do it for me. I am also doing it for my my wife, son, parents, brother, and sisters. I will finally graduate in December of 2012. Then I plan on working on another degree in something I will enjoy the rest of my life. I found from working in a job I hated. It doesn't matter how much you make if you hate it, its not worth it. If you can do something you love and make a good living that is all that really matters. So that is exactly what I am doing.
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