How to Power Through Feeling Out of Place at Community College: 7 Tips

My name is Aminata Sy. I’m a woman from Senegal, West Africa, who believed I could achieve more and went for it.

Why I’m Writing about Excelling at Community College

Feeling out of place and dealing with adversities were a constant part of my academic experiences. I’m the author of the memoir Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, in which I write about how I started out as a high-school dropout and non-English-speaking immigrant and yet went on to earn a high-school equivalency diploma and associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees and to land a career as an American diplomat. All that time, I was a wife and mother too, and had plenty of family responsibilities.

If you want to better yourself through learning, you can do it too!

Through my blog, I hope to help U.S. community college students excel in their learning, especially women who are low-income, first-generation college students – that is, learners who are the first in their families to attend college. Why? Because I was a low-income, first-generation college student throughout my academic journey and intimately understand this experience.

I know what it’s like to be the first person in one’s family to attend college but have no clue how to start or stay in school.

I know what it’s like to return to school as a married woman, a mother, a high-school dropout, and an English learner.

I know what it’s like to live in poverty, whether in Senegal or in America.

I know what it’s like to have big dreams and goals but have no idea how to realize them.

I’ve lived through these experiences. However, getting an education has transformed my life, with community college serving as the foundation of my academic career.

I ended up excelling at Community College of Philadelphia (CCP), earning my associate’s degree with highest honors.  I know that this kind of academic achievement is possible for you too! I want to share my experiences with you because I had no one in my immigrant community in Philadelphia to guide me through my educational journey, so I understand how overwhelming and lonely this academic journey can feel and be. Hang in there; you can do this.

I wanted knowledge so I could support my children in their education, financial freedom so I and my family could have a decent lifestyle, and the opportunity to see what big dreams and goals I could achieve if I pushed myself.

Think of my blog as an extension of your learning resources as a community college student and a dialogue between one community college student and another who was once in your shoes. I’m sharing with you the tools I applied to excel in my education, so you can excel in yours.

My blog is meant to be an interactive, uplifting, and supportive space where you can share your experiences and your thoughts about the articles published here. I welcome your questions on specific topics related to supporting your learning at community college.

We all have the potential for outstanding achievements that make us proud. Are you ready to excel at community college? If yes, you’re in the right place! In this article, I share How to Power Through Feeling out of Place at Community College: 7 Tips.

#1 Tip: Embrace the Transformative Power of Learning

Learning can transform your life. For me, learning has meant more than accumulating degrees; it has allowed me to see that I can achieve just about anything that I commit to.

While in school for 11 years, from a General Education Diploma level (GED) to a master’s degree program,  I dealt with many life struggles – personal, academic, and professional – but I stayed the course, no matter what. That level of commitment to anything will move you forward.

I discovered that human beings have limitless capabilities, but to experience our capabilities, we have to push ourselves. I learned that no other human being is better than I am or you are and that extraordinary accomplishments are born out of daily practice.

I learned that discipline can equal freedom, both for the short and long terms. I learned that courage is simply showing up and being open-minded. Even if you have no idea what you’re doing and are very much afraid, you do it anyway, afraid.

These are some of the gifts of my journey, and they have changed the way I look at myself, the world around me, and beyond. What started out as a desire to improve myself in order to help my children understand their homework assignments and learn new materials, turned out to be so much more, not just for me and for my family, but for others too.

If you commit to learning, it will transform your life and open doors to achieve almost anything your mind can conceive.

1. Why are you attending community college?
2. What do you hope to get out of your education?
3. When you achieve your stated goal for your learning, what do you believe that could mean to your life?

#2 Tip: Assess Your Situation 

Get clear about where you are in your learning. When I returned to school to pursue an associate’s degree, every process of my academic journey seemed extremely hard to achieve, and many seemed impossible.

As an English learner, I had a long way to go to improve my English reading and writing. I didn’t even have basic math skills like adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying, because I had been out of school for over a decade. As I considered entering CCP, I had no clue how to get started, much less how to succeed once there. I didn’t even know how to enroll in college or how to pay for my education. I didn’t know the academic expectations in college or whether I could meet them. I didn’t know if I could juggle my family responsibilities with college. To sum it up, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and graduation seemed like a faraway dream.

Yet I decided to take my learning one step at a time, one assignment at a time, and one semester at a time. I worked on weakness after weakness, powered through fear after fear and doubt after doubt, asked for help at every turn, leaned on my husband’s support, drew motivation from my children, and reminded myself often that getting an education could transform my life. And it has!

Part of powering through feeling out of place at community college is assessing your present situation and taking action that would improve it. So grab a notebook and write down your reflections on the questions below.

1. What is your current academic situation?
2. What areas do you need to improve, and what is your plan for doing so?
3. What are your strengths, how can you build on them, and what is your plan for doing so?

#3: Build a Solid Academic Foundation

Being open-minded about learning and clear about where you most need to focus your energy and time will serve you well. As a  community college student, these are some of the actions I took that allowed me to excel; I hope they can help you too. With the support of professors, instructors, tutors, and peers, I worked on my weaknesses in reading, writing, and math and made steady improvement in these subjects. 

For example, to improve my reading skills, I learned how to annotate my assigned course readings. I summarized each paragraph in a sentence or two written in the margins and circled vocabulary words that I didn’t understand, looking them up later in a dictionary and putting them into my own sentences.

To improve my writing, I edited and re-edited my papers with the help of tutors, often going through ten drafts before arriving at the final version. This process allowed me to study the mistakes I made and avoid repeating them, and thus to progressively grow as a writer. To this day, I love working with editors because they provide you with insights that could be hard to see by yourself.

In math, I had to relearn arithmetic and started out with remedial courses. To make sure I caught up with these basic skills, I did at least double the number of problems assigned for homework. This meant when I was assigned 20 problems for homework, I completed 40 of them, noted what I didn’t understand, and checked my work with tutors and professors for guidance. Over time, I started to improve my math skills through consistent practice.

I paid attention to my academic strengths and leveraged them to move me forward inside and outside of the classroom. For example, I was good at following directions and asking the right people the right questions, which helped me to figure out what was expected of me and find ways to carry out those expectations. I went to professors’ office hours and asked questions related to assignments in order to better understand them. I even took drafts of my papers to receive feedback on them.

I wasn’t competing with other students; I was my own competition. I wanted to get a little bit better every day and took the following steps consistently. (1) I set goals that met the expectations of my instructors.  At the beginning of each course, I read the syllabus carefully to get a clear sense of assignments and deadlines throughout the semester, asked the professors any clarification questions, and contacted tutors to find out their schedules, so I could attend tutoring sessions as needed. (2) I set personal standards of excellence that challenged me to improve beyond course expectations, such as working on multiple drafts of my papers to submit my best possible work. (3) I incorporated learning in my day-to-day routine. For example, I studied while waiting for my kids at their after-school activities.

1. How do you approach learning, and is that approach serving you well?
2. How will you work to remedy your top two academic weaknesses?
3. What specific days and times do you plan to attend tutoring sessions offered at your school, so that you continually improve in your learning?

#4 Tip: Take Full Ownership of Your Learning

Own being a student, and everything that comes with it. Taking full ownership of my learning at community college remains one of the best decisions of my academic career. I led my academic progress by connecting with and staying in touch with people in and out of school who helped me remain in school and grow. That meant I took the initiative to first figure out where I was in my learning, decide where I wanted to be, and commit to self-improvement.

Taking full ownership of your learning requires discipline, commitment, resilience, and patience. I assembled the different pieces of the puzzle of my learning by asking administrators, professors, tutors, and students questions to gain insights that would position me for a rich educational experience. I gathered information about financial aid, scholarships, expectations for my courses, tutoring support, and extracurricular activities. I organized my life’s responsibilities around supporting my academic progress and dropped any activities that distracted from my learning. I fully accepted my identity as a student and learner and made it a top priority in my life.

If your learning is not a top priority in your daily routines, you can’t expect excellent results. If you’re expecting instructors to provide you all the knowledge you need, if you’re not willing to sacrifice some activities or “down time” to pursue your education, if you’re not seeking support and taking advantage it, if you’re satisfied with just a passing grade when you could’ve earned an A or a B, you haven’t yet taken full ownership of your learning.

1. How do you plan to take ownership of your learning?
2. Who is going to support you in your academic efforts?
3. What activities will you cut out of your routine so you can better focus on your learning?

#5: Ask for Help at Every Turn 

Ask for help, even if you’re afraid to. I asked for help and support so much at community college that it became my default problem-solving strategy. Sometimes, I was afraid to ask for help; other times I was confident. It didn’t matter how I felt about asking for help; what mattered to me was getting the support I needed to make progress in my learning.

I implemented the support provided a little bit at a time, day in and day out. This approach allowed me to gain increasing clarity and improve my learning experience. When my first English professor said that if I practiced grammar regularly, I would become a better writer, I did free grammar exercises online, printed my work, and went over my responses with tutors for enhanced comprehension, even when I got them right. I also progressively built my self-confidence as a result of my improvement and began to feel less and less out of place and more and more as if I belonged in college.

Here were the key responses that I received when I asked for help at community college, and how I approached the different situations.

“No, I can’t help you.” My response was to ask the next person.

 “Maybe I can help you.” My response was to check in later to see if “maybe” had turned into “yes.”

“I’ll put you in touch with someone who can help you.” My response was to seek out that other person immediately.

“Yes, I can help you.” My response was to stay connected to that person and make full use of the support offered.

1. What actions will you take to face any fear, doubt, or insecurity related to asking for help?
2. What is one question you’ll be asking someone today?
3. Who are the different people you’ll turn to for help in school and outside of it?

#6 Tip: Focus on Your Life’s Priorities

Stand firm on your top priorities. For me, my top three priorities while attending community college were my marriage, my children, and my learning. My life revolved around these top three priorities, and anything outside of them was negotiable or left out completely.

1. What are the top three priorities in your life right now?
2. How will you organize your life, so you can honor your priorities?
3. Who will support you in your commitment?

#7 Tip: Keep Going, No Matter What

Every journey starts with one step. You can achieve your academic goals if you can stick with the learning process. 

There will be days when you’ll question the value of pursuing an education while facing so many obstacles in your path. Why will you question it? Because it takes time for you to see and experience the fruits of your labor, whether academic or professional.

You won’t quickly see your academic progress or even fully understand how your learning could concretely help you in a future career. This lack of positive feedback at the start of your  educational journey will raise doubts of whether the sacrifices you’re making will have tangible rewards someday. Discouragement will set in.

We usually have two key choices as community college students. One choice is to quit when things get really hard and really uncertain. The other choice is to power through moments of fear, doubt, and insecurity to find out what’s on the other side of these feelings. 

I chose to keep going, no matter what. I took my educational journey one day at a time, simply focusing on what I needed to do that day and then building on it the following day and on the next day after that. I talked to trusted people who cared about me, such as my husband, to gain additional perspective, support, and guidance. People who could support you in your education may also include parents, grandmothers, siblings, friends, or teachers. 

1. Who is the number one supporter of your learning and how do you plan to engage that person consistently? 
2. How do you plan to handle discouragement, doubt, fear, insecurity, or feeling out of place in your educational journey?
3. Who and what motivates you to keep learning and why?

Reflection Exercise of the Month

Each of the seven tips discussed above was followed by a series of questions. For each tip, select two of those questions, get your notebook and pen, and reflect on those questions in the weeks to come.

Week 1

Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #1 and a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #2.

Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #1 and a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #2.

Week 2

Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #3 and a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #4.

Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #3 and a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #4.

Week 3

Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #5 and a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #6.

Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #5 and a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #6.

Week 4

Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #7.

Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #7.

That’s it for this article on How to Power Through Feeling out of Place at Community College: 7 Tips. Our feelings as community college students are valid, and the adversities we encounter there are real. But the most important question is, how do we choose to navigate our feelings and respond to those adversities?

As a first-generation college student, you’ll face many obstacles in your path to academic achievement. But how you choose to respond to those obstacles can determine your future and that of people close to you and far away. 

You have the ability not only to meet but to exceed your own expectations about your learning. What actions are you willing to take to move you in the direction of academic excellence?

If you find this article helpful, share it with community college students and invite them to subscribe to my newsletter, in order to be the first to receive newly published articles.

Do you want to know more about how I went from a high-school dropout to a master’s degree? Grab a copy of my memoir Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, set for release in February 2025. I would appreciate your review of it when it appears on Amazon!

Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best. 

Keep going!

Hi, I’m Aminata Sy. I’m the author of the memoir Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, in which I write about how I started out as a high-school dropout and non-English-speaking immigrant in America and yet went on to earn a high-school equivalency diploma and associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees and to land a dream career. All that time, I was a wife and mother too and had plenty of family responsibilities. Through my blog, I teach U.S. community college students how to excel in their education.

Are you ready to excel in community college and transform your life? 

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