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| Starting Out at Carroll Made A Big Difference | ||
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By Diana Scott We tout having low tuition, small class size, caring instructors, and state-of-the-market technology readily available for student use as reasons Carroll provides a better freshman year. The experiences of former Carroll student Daniel Winter seem to indicate that what we say is so. This past year, after an exhausting 8-hour interview, Daniel Winter was hired as a UNIX systems administrator with Microsoft in Texas making more than $50,000 a year. This confident young man, with an A.A. from Carroll and a B.S. from Salisbury State University, was not always so sure of himself. After “coasting through high school,” he decided to enroll at Carroll because he said, “there was no reason to go to a four-year school and pay big bucks.” Besides, at the time, he had three siblings who were attending Penn State, Hood, and UMBC and he “didn’t want to place an additional financial burden” upon his parents. To make matters worse, he said he wasn’t sure if he was “ready to go to any college.” Looking back, he now recognizes that Carroll allowed him to do a lot of growing up. He found that Carroll provided him with “a small, more personal environment” than he might have received had he gone to a four-year school. He surprised himself when he found that Carroll’s courses were both interesting and challenging. “I enrolled over and over again in English courses taught by Jody Nusholtz,” he said enthusiastically. He was in her Creative Writing I and II classes, and from those sessions a small, intimate poetry class was created. The development of this new course was due, in part, to the excitement of the students who had taken Creative Writing. “That was the first time I had thoroughly enjoyed any class and to this day I have not found better humanity courses anywhere.” Daniel appreciated Sarah Sayre for being very thorough in her teaching. “I was pleased to be able to converse on an intelligible level with my girlfriend, who was a biology major at Salisbury, having had only Ms. Sayre’s biology course.” Daniel tested out of Carroll’s CIS 101 course, but found a friend in Greg Stefanelli, who spent many hours talking to him about the computer technology field. Daniel liked the fact that “whenever I wanted to use a computer, I could go into the lab and gain access to one.” By the time Daniel transferred to Salisbury State, he had decided to major in Mathematics and Computer Science. He graduated from Salisbury with a B.S. degree and was featured in the Delmarva Daily Times as one of their outstanding graduates. The Daily Times said he was the first of Salisbury’s students to get a job with Microsoft, and quoted Daniel as saying he was hired “more for his people skills than his math credentials,” which, the reporter added, were impressive. This college, like Salisbury, takes pride in its graduate, Daniel Winter, who credits the community college with the excellent start it gave him. The college has many such successes. By sharing them, we hope to inspire others to follow their dreams by beginning their college journey at Carroll.
Academic division chairs serve pizza on Big Wednesday.
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