Most of you will never know me. I’ve gotten to know far more of you than I ever expected, and to quote Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
I started at Lincoln Land Community College back in January 2014, in my junior year of “high school”. I was homeschooled- and no, this does not mean I stayed inside and played video games all day, despite what several people have assumed. Nor was I given a repressive monkish education, as other people have assumed. (People make a remarkable amount of assumptions.) Indeed, I quite enjoyed homeschooling. What homeschooling did mean in 2014 was the ability to take college classes far ahead of everyone else. My very first class, the only one I took in Spring 2014, was Music Appreciation, and as a lover of orchestral music, I found it extremely fascinating. I still flash back to that class every time I hear Tchaikovsky’s Montagues and Capulets. That happens more often than you might think!
Now, I had little interest in birds back at this time, hard as it is for those who know me to believe this. It was my second semester at Lincoln Land, and my first Biology class , that began to give me a fondness for birds. I started going to the Lincoln Land Community College’s Bird Banding Station, and that is not to be missed, especially for biology majors like myself. I became obsessed with birds as a side effect, and that obsession has not yet subsided.
During my third and last part-time semester, I applied for the Honors Program. I’m still not sure why they let me in, but they did. I’m assuming it has something to do with the fact that they need a homeschooler to round out the list. My sitting next to the then-president of the Honors Program in Biology class might also have swayed their vote. Either way, I ended up in the Honors Program. Having Honors classes, in addition to certifying my status as a know-it-all, also forced me to socialize with other people, and I made a few friends as a result.
However, I made many more friends randomly on the side. Heck, I met one of my best friends by calling him a stalker. He followed me from a math class to a history class, and promptly sat down near me. Under those conditions, what else would you call that person? We’ve been friends ever since. That is probably my favorite memory I’ve made at Lincoln Land.
I’ve enjoyed almost all of my classes at Lincoln Land, and with three exceptions which I will not list here, I think that I would recommend all the classes and teachers I had. My favorite classes were all my Biology classes, my Organic Chemistry classes (not for the coursework, but
for the teacher and students), my American Politics and U.S. History classes, and my very first class, Music Appreciation.
If I was to provide any advice… I’ll stop right there. No one cares about advice. So, I’ll give two commands. Be friendly. Explore everything. You can canoe on the pond if you know whom to ask. You can eat at a bistro on campus, and I don’t mean Subway. You can hold a bird in your hand, and yes, it’s worth more than two in the bush. There’s hidden depths to Lincoln Land that I know I have never even explored. Seek them out and you will be greatly rewarded, I assure you.
Also, the snacks in the bookstore are noticeably cheaper than those in the vending machines.
I will be off to SIUC in the fall, and while as a botany major I’m excited at the prospects of living that close to the Shawnee National Forest, I really will miss Lincoln Land Community College, the place where I’ve spent seven semesters of my life. (Boy, do I sound like a college student- I’m measuring time in semesters!) To quote a friend of mine who will also be graduating from here this semester, “It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it’s not been real fun.” The “real fun” is still to come, just down the road.
Jared Gorrell can be reached at lamp@llcc.edu
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