Were it not for the scholarship the school awarded me to attend two years in a row, I might have never found my love for poetry and likewise my love of making music/rapping. Plus, Professor Collihan made it fun, which always makes learning and engaging easier (I'll never forget the classes I took with her as well)! Similarly, it was through the creative-writing festival hosted at ARC, SummerWords, that I learned how much I loved writing. While my other responsibilities ultimately prevented me from being able to go to the MUN conference, the experience of getting to work with others in an extracurricular academic context pushed me to continue doing so at UC Davis. Even though I was working in AmeriCorps as a VISTA and still at-risk as far as housing, I decided to join MUN – which is run by Professor Collihan – during my last semester at ARC. Likewise, growing up, the opportunities for academic clubs like Model United Nations (MUN) were pretty limited or inaccessible for me – but it was at ARC that I came to see their value. It was through these reaffirming experiences with the amazing professors at ARC that I, as someone who hated school growing up (I had something like 120 absences throughout high school), ultimately became the student and person I am today. Professors like Frank Araujo, Kathleen Collihan, and Betty Chan all advised and mentored me at the most difficult and isolating times in my life, and I can never thank them enough for that. These difficulties ultimately left me homeless/at-risk for a large portion of the time that I was attending ARC, but both during this period and during the period which led up to it, I met some of the most amazing and inspiring professors who were always willing to stay after class to chat with me. Moving here alone brought with it some great struggles that I couldn't have foreseen at that age, but which had a profound impact on me personally. I started at American River College in January of 2016, when I was 18, after moving to Sacramento from Williamsburg, VA on my own. Jasanté Howard Alum / 2018 / Political Science / American River College "ARC gave me the toolkit and self-confidence to handle the academic rigor at places like UC Davis and Princeton."
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