Sarah had pretty much freaked out, when we did some SAT practice work, as part of home schooling, back in about 2013 or so. She had decided she was NOT college material, and nothing any of us could say would convince her otherwise. She planned to work as a nanny, or open a day care for a while. Then she was also, for a while, thinking of doing bakery work, or opening a small cafe, or catering business. She kind of got discouraged about that when she talked to a caterer about working for her, and discovered that (of course) most catering takes place on Friday evening and Saturday. So that was going to make it difficult.
That's when I decided to just let her work in fast food and/or retail for a while, and find out that minimum wage jobs are just really not that great, and, hopefully, light a fire under her, and get her motivated to do something more with her life. It worked.
She has a keen interest in metal working, particularly swords etc. And thought maybe blacksmithing would be an interesting hobby at the very least, and maybe a career. She looked into going to some sort of trade school and discovered that she was still going to have to take a test, this one maybe not QUITE as hard as the SAT, but harder than the GED, called the HISET. She recently did some practice versions of it and totally *smoked* them, even though she had not really cracked much of a book in over a year. This boosted her confidence substantially and she started exploring other things, and circled back around the the idea of going to college and taking mechanical engineering. She has always been the one who wanted to know how things worked, and who wanted to take things apart and put them back together, etc. So, she started looking at machinist programs and mechanical engineering programs, comparing the types of jobs she would be likely to get, in both tracks, and the pay as compared to the debt factor, for paying for school.
In the end, what she has settled on is a combined track, where she will start out with a machinist program at a community college back down in Huntsville, Calhoun Community College, and graduate in two years as a machinist certificate. Then she will decide at that point, whether to move on, and get a bachelors at Walla Walla, in Mechanical engineering. We went and spoke to the head of the engineering department, when we were out in Walla Walla for the wedding (always nice when the dept. head is someone her mom and dad went to school with), and he really encouraged her to follow through, and even tried to talk her into just spending her whole college experience at Walla Walla. He said that a mechanical engineer who has practical machinist knowledge too, would be a VERY marketable skill, and he essentially offered her a job, in the department, when she gets there, doing machining for students working on their Senior projects, etc. He sat and looked at Calhoun's program with her, and showed her how to tweak it so that she would only need to spend three, and maybe even just two additional years at Walla Walla, in order to get her bachelors.
She thought long and hard about the two tracks (just going straight to WW, or staying in Huntsville for the first two years) and decided she really wants to get the two year degree first. She will stay with the parents of one of her good friends, and is actually looking for work down there, right now, hoping to be down there before January, so that after her first term there, she will start getting 'resident' discounts. She'll start school in the fall. She's really excited about it. In the mean time, there is a church there, that offers free classes to help her pass the HISET, which should not take her long to accomplish, since she did so well on the practice tests, and she will sock away money, too, to help pay tuition, when the time comes.
We are pretty proud of the path she is pursuing and it will be fun to see her grow and learn in her chosen career.
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