This summer, my plan was to get a part-time job and earn some spending money towards one of the three colleges I was planning on going to: Florida A&M University, Tennessee State University, or Southern University. Everything was going good. I graduated in the top 15 percent of my class with a 3.45 GPA and I had some graduation money from relatives and friends. Then two weeks after I received my diploma, my parents told me that I would be attending a summer program called PREFICS for Computer Science at Tuskegee University. My parents had assumed that there would be no job openings because of the bad economy and they said that I could earn early college credits. .
PREFICS was a two month summer program designed for people who wanted to major in Computer Science to get a jump start on their major. In the program you took eight hours of classes: three Computer Science hours, 4 math hours, and 1 orientation hour. On the weekly schedule, however, we took Computer Science three times for three hours at a time, Pre-Calculus two times for four hours at a time, and the orientation class one time a day for an hour and a half. The worst thing about it is that the teachers said that they had to cram five months worth of work into two and a half.
It was like a living nightmare. My major was not Computer Science, it was Computer Engineering. The curriculums for each one was totally different and I was stuck with no way out of the program. I really did not want to be there anyway, so I really did not try that hard at the work. My grades suffered because of my not wanting to be there. In addition, I was told that my grades would not transfer anyway because of the different curriculums, but the GPA that I would receive would follow me to anywhere I attended.
My math teacher was named Mr. D. He was an interesting teacher and he made jokes once and a while in the class. It was not like he was that hard of a teacher, but the cramming of five months of work into two and a half made work a whole lot harder.