Raritan Valley Community College: The Lion's Den

Whilst trying every conceivable effort to find employment, I have enrolled in a couple of courses at the nearby Branchburg, N.J.-based institute of higher education serving Somerset and Hunterdon Counties. Enter good old Raritan Valley Community College and all the nicknames we had for it in high school (i.e. Harvard on the Hill, UCLA - Upper Clinton Lower Annandale, and I'm not sure, but somebody must have thought of this one before I did: BC - Branchburg College). Raritan Valley might have been the butt of many of our jokes, but it has a very strong and respected academic program among community colleges and a well-experienced faculty to boot. Combine that with the inexpensive tuition and the great transfer potential to a four-year college and you got the educational route I should have followed in retrospect (although you couldn't tell me that when I was 18).

The campus of RVCC is sprawled out over several acres on the hills which lie between US Hwy 22 and I-78 (at Exit 26). It has every freedom which seemed like a faraway fantasy of academia during the years I was cooped up in elementary/middle/high school, waiting for the hall pass to return so I could dart to the bathroom (without running of course, and given the fact that I had my student ID displayed from a lanyard wrapped around my neck like a leash). It's got multiple buildings that feature: classrooms and labs, a theater that doubles as a planetarium, a mutli-story library (get it? no??), computer labs, athletic fields, a sizable courtyard, a cafeteria, an athletic building consisting of a gym and a pool, and vending machines at every turn--the epitomic portrayal of a cinematic high school set in southern California during the early-'90s.

I took my only other class at RV during the summer of 2006, between my sophomore and junior years at my four-year university. I had previously withdrawn from Quinnipiac's algebra classes twice because the professors at the math department saw you as more of a number than as a student (showing your work didn't matter, if you screwed up any part of the test question, it was wrong--no partial credit, case closed). I was wasting my time taking a math course at QU, so I made up the credits at Raritan, where my teacher would stay after class as late as she could to answer any questions and also to make sure we understood the material (aka, she cared about the students' progress and growth in the subject).


Well hop in the DeLorean, set the flux capacitor, and floor it to 88--flash forward four years to 2010. At age 25, I'm feeling an awful lot like Billy Madison rolling up for class amongst the many fresh-faced undergraduate teenagers. During this semester, I will be taking a free one-session "E-Commerce for Small Business" seminar later on in October--can't hurt if it's free! Right now, however, I am exploring the realm of computer programming by taking a class in database management software called "Introduction to Oracle: SQL and PL/SQL."