Why I Want To Attend College

During the entirety of my educational career, starting in elementary school, it was continually said to me that going to college increases your earning potential. With this in mind, I was certainly going to attend college, but I never seriously thought about it as a way to increase my knowledge and skill in a field I was interested in. Unfortunately, my family wasn’t exactly supportive. I’m the first person in my family to attend college and have been required to be financially self-supporting due to my family’s financial background. I relocated to South Dakota from Florida to begin my new adventure. My only emotional support came from my grandmother who passed away just three weeks before I began my first semester. This took a toll on me that required quite a bit of time to recover from. My grades suffered greatly as I struggled to overcome the loss of my closest family member while facing new challenges college and South Dakota presented. Despite this I continued on the path I had chosen and kept pursuing my education.

I decided if I was going to invest the amount of time and money I was in to college, I should do it for something I’m interested and skilled in and not for the paycheck. I then switched to a psychology major, but was still unsure about what I should do with my degree.

My junior year I finally figured out what I wanted to do; I wanted to use my knowledge of psychology to help the criminal justice system which is notoriously in conflict with the field. This is when I added a criminal justice major to my academic profile. After doing some research, I discovered that many people who choose careers at the intersection of psychology and law hold advanced degrees. With this in mind I began getting more serious about college. My grades and attendance improved as I started thinking about my new goal of graduate