Brandon Ruiz Gutierrez
Staff Writer
For many students, this is the beginning of your career at DMACC, and for some of us, this isn’t our first time coming back to college. Maybe it’s a second try, a third, fourth, or even fifth; whatever the case may be, it’s safe to say college students go through trial and error.
My journey began after I graduated from Valley High School in 2023 and went straight to college without even knowing what I wanted to do with my life. That should kind of hint at where I’m heading with this.
I was a liberal arts major for my freshman year for an underwhelming three months—underlining “underwhelm,” primarily because I kept my old high school habits: I procrastinated all my work and believed I would get away with it, which I did for a bit before I fell into a pit of overloaded missing assignments.
I now recall when my personal finance instructor warned me about the “snowball effect” in college, which went way over my head at the time. He mentioned that the longer I procrastinated on my assignments, the more work I would accumulate like a snowball rolling down a hill.
As the stress of schoolwork grew, I took the easy way out and stopped showing up, using my new job at a restaurant as an excuse to drop out and chase money instead.
Fun fact: according to AddictionCenter.com, food service and line cooks are in the top 10 highest risks to fall under drug and alcohol consumption–I happened to be one of those top 10 within a few months of dropping out of college. I kept trying to pursue a degree despite losing credits for the first semester, so I enrolled for summer classes to retake what I missed, still under the liberal arts program.
I thought I could balance work and school, but as soon as I started, I was falling behind because of my tight schedule, working over 45 hours a week.
I withdrew and postponed my next try to fall of 2024 at the Ankeny campus. It was around this time I began to develop an addiction to weed and alcohol, so once the semester began, I flushed my opportunity right away by showing up hungover or high every day instead of catching up with my assignments. Instead of fighting my impulses and thinking clearly, I gave up on myself, and I lost control through the remaining seven months before I began my sobriety journey; part of my journey was returning to college and this time studying video production.
This is where my story reaches its epilogue, and I conclude with a happy ending, right? Well, after I outgrew my bad habits and started focusing on school, I wound up right where I started with academic disqualification. But how?
I recognized that each attempt had something in common: the snowball effect. Suddenly, that conversation with my professor spiraled around in my head day and night. After all these failed semesters, I had given up, but a conversation with the video professor convinced me to give it one last try.
My story is still continuing, and more mistakes are bound to be made, but with each fall, it is an opportunity to learn and grow, and the beautiful thing about DMACC is that it provides second chances. I now know what I want and how to manage my time for it; the question now remains: what will you do with yours?
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