By Matthew Rostkowski
Juniors and Seniors at Rocky Hill High School are getting a jump on their college education through the Manchester Community College High School partnership program.
Manchester Community College has partnered with local Connecticut High Schools, including RHHS, in allowing upperclassmen to enroll in up to 2 classes (or 8 credits) at MCC for free.
RHHS already offers college credit earning courses through AP (Advanced Placement) and UConn ECE (Early College Experience) classes but uniquely the courses offered through MCC are the same classes that formal college students are taking, under the same professors and course material, whereas AP and UConn courses are taught by RHHS teachers.
This more authentic college experience is something that senior Naysa Abraham enjoys the most.
She currently takes Introduction to Sociology (in person) and described how, “I thoroughly love sitting in a room and talking about how society works and what makes it tick, so sociology felt like a logical next step.”
For high achieving students, the program offers the opportunity for students who took all the courses in a particular subject offered at the high school at a higher level.
This was the case for senior Shaswat Ganisshan who currently takes Linear Algebra and Calculus-Based Physics 1 (both online). “The reason I took linear algebra was because I exhausted all of the math courses offered at RHHS by my junior year and wanted to continue taking math courses in my senior year,” he said. “During my junior year I found physics to be really interesting, but there are no physics courses offered at rhhs beyond uconn physics one, so to continue taking physics in my senior year, I turned to MCC for their calculus-based physics course.”
For Shaswat, he admitted that there was some adjusting needed for his courses, especially as they are both fully online, “I don’t have any live lectures for classes which makes it difficult to ask questions while viewing a lecture, while in RHHS I can easily ask a question to a teacher during a lecture. However, a positive aspect of this is that professors have office hours, which is an hour dedicated to answering students’ questions. So, if I had several questions across several topics it would be easy to ask them all in one sitting.”
Another meaningful aspect to the partnership program comes in that it allows students to get the inherent prerequisites of their college major out of the way before they even step foot on campus. Thus, students can dive into the more advanced courses of their major sooner rather than later.
“I want to major in some sort of sociology and political science, so this seemed like a wonderful first step into that,” said Naysa.