By Isaac Piper
The way my Tri-C student life and personal life have interacted has changed in the past year. In my first year I found it very easy to balance both classes and my personal life. As it would turn out it was too easy for a reason.
It was the summer of 2025 when things changed. After setting up an appointment with a Tri-C counselor it was found that I was very off track both my major and graduating on time. As my scholarship had strict graduation deadlines this was cause for concern.
I had discovered my major was completely wrong in the system due to a misunderstanding by my first counselor visit. This one error caused me to be so behind that I would need to take an extra semester paid out of pocket as well as needing to take a minimum of six classes a semester. To further add to the frustration, I had met with multiple counselors with a clear path of what I wanted to do and none of them caught it until the second year.
Not only did I have to deal with the stress of this news, I had to fix my academic plan in only a month. Unfortunately, this was not a simple task. As I was planning to transfer to Cleveland State University, each class taken at Tri-C had to be very specific.
It should have taken one or two meetings but instead took upwards of 6. Each counselor had different tweaks made to my plan that all combated each other. This led to a mess of random classes. While it was finally sorted out, the stress continued.
Looking to the present and future, I now have significantly less time for both work and my personal life. Taking six classes is already difficult but with how specific the classes have to be, many of them are at random times and dates, spread between multiple locations. It was very frustrating that an entire year was practically wasted all because of one mistake that wasn’t made by me.
