I got up early for my first day of college. It was a bright new start, a place beyond Greenville, which I had known for my whole life. It was ultimate freedom: nobody to tell me how to live my life or what to do as an individual, my car and me. The great freedom and excitement I felt throughout my first day of college would last me throughout my college experience. It felt good to be getting away, even if it was only a small step enrolling in the local community college.

My car was the 1994 Plymouth Sundance that my parents gave me upon my graduation. It was a good little car, with a basic radio and its basic three-speed automatic transmission. I drove that car throughout much of my college experience. This day, I hoped in my car and I was off to a new world, a new experience, and a new way of finding myself. I arrived around 9:30 AM, early for my 11:00 AM class. I wanted to be early to avoid the crowds and find a parking space. I only can wish my luck were as good as my aspirations.

Traffic getting to college was not particularly bad at all. My highway driving skills where not perfect, but I was able to avoid getting into an accident. Sometimes car honked at me as I started to change into their lane, but I quickly learned their blind spots. As it was late enough in the day as I was proceeding there, I found little traffic until I got to the fabled Route 4 and headed north to the college. It was bumper to bumper traffic the whole way up there.

I proceeded to the North Driveway, figuring my first class was near there, so it would be a sensible place to park. Indeed, I believed that I would be able to get a close spot, despite the fact that it was very hectic the first day and there was little parking anywhere. I started looking in 'B' lot with no luck, and then drove over to 'Q' lot. Found nothing there, but a nice public safety person pointed me to the 'T' lot. I drove over there, using the road behind the campus center, and was guided to parking spot by public safety. It was very nice to have them help me find a spot, particularly one that was only a short walk to my first class. Parking would be an important part of my HVCC experience, as it ran through the next two years of my life.

I walked up to my first class in the Bulmer Building. It was on the third floor. Being my first day, I went through the main entrance, not realizing there was an even shorter way from the parking lot. I took the elevator up to the third floor, as I was not as energetic about climbing three flights of stairs later in my life. This was an interesting new building, applying certain principles of modernity to its design. At the same time, it was incredibly sterile and lifeless. The division of those principles would further define how I saw the world: a promise for tomorrow, but a threat to our freedom and dignity.

My first class was English Composition I in Room 308. It was an interesting class, taught by Professor Hathaway. He was a nice man, but made clear his high expectations. The classroom had the most interesting plastic tables with soft-tops. Very modern, but also very cold and lifeless. The technology available for use there was impressive. The professor instructed the class of 25 students with a document camera projected on a big screen. I was very impressed by all of this, and I found my first lecture to be rather thought provoking and challenging unlike much of high school.

Then it was off to Statistics. Professor Penisi was a nice older woman who had been teaching business classes for a long time. She seemed open minded and creative, and was ready to really jump into statistics right away. We learned about mean, median, and mode to start things out. She said we could use any calculator we wanted, and program that calculator anyway we saw fit. That was a big bonus for me who never was much of a math person to start out. As much as I remember this first class, I remember the forth one even more distinctively. That was the day of September 11, 2001 when the world was changed by planes hitting the world trade center. That day was so defining, in Amstuz hall watching the planes hit the buildings over and over in the room with yellow painted walls. Penisi shared our horror.

Back to the first day. After class I went to my car for one of many good lunches in the driver seat of Sundance listening the radio. I really enjoyed the freedom of having a radio and being able to listen to whatever I wanted to, be it County or Rock 'n Roll. Later that year I would find my love for County music and my need to find a new rural persona to preserve part of who I was from a college environment that encouraged a whole new extreme set of values. Soon after, I would discover station WRPI with it's show Democracy NOW! that would give me a radical perspective that would forever change me world.

I then walked over to the Campus Center and up to the second floor in the Career Center. I had signed up for work-study and gotten a job there. I was set to work from 12:30 to 3:00 that day, a reasonable schedule for somebody new to school for the first time. It was my first office job and my first real work experience that taught me some new skills that eventually would benifit me greatly. My first assignment involved sorting through graduate surveys and recording down the data. Not particularly exciting, but for my first real job at $7.50 an hour, it seemed like I was doing virtually nothing for money. Far better then working in the bakery like I worked so hard during the previous summer.

It finally was 3:00. I went back to my car and got out my books to study. I walked over to the library and went to the second floor. I sat back in a comfortable chair and started to jot down some things in my English Comp Journal. It was a lot of fun as I wrote down my thoughts on the day. I had previous done some free writing over the summer, but I was getting class credit to express myself. I captured the words of a confused but passionate student who sought to find himself in a big bureaucratic world whose face was only starting to get known. Next I went to a table and worked on some very basic statistics homework on mean, median, and mode. I completed it all in about an hour.

I went in my car and drove home. It was still sunny out, but a day had largely gone past at HVCC. It was an exciting experience that first day, and many of things I had experienced would become ingrained by future experiences. I loved my first day and I loved every other day at HVCC as I searched for myself and a greater freedom as an individual.