Alumni Remember - Lisa fast

The way that I learned about MiraCosta was there was one day where my friends and I were driving around in the general area, there's some shops down on Mission Avenue by the beach and on our way back we saw the college and we decided to park and walk around and look at it 'cause we didn't really know what it was, we hadn't heard of it and when I realized it was a community college I didn't even really know what a community college was so we opened up the schedule of classes, noticed it was $13 per unit, got super excited that we could afford it. So, two of us enrolled in a class and that's how I started coming here. I remember back then it was a much quieter campus. It's not very loud or busy nowadays but compared to how it is now there was a lot less traffic, there are less people. And the way I remember it was, for me it was a commuter school because I was commuting from about 45 minutes away so I would just come here for my classes and I would work my class schedule around my work schedule but I would spend large periods of time in the Student Center by the cafeteria, and I loved the windows, 'cause if you looked out on the right kind of day when there weren't too many clouds out you could see the beach and I remember sitting in there eating lunches and maybe once a week you'd see one of your professors in there go to eat their lunch and it was always kind of fun to sit next to 'em and ask them questions about their profession and their discipline and what they teach and everything and it was just really casual and the professors were always accessible as they still are now. What changed in me when I was going here was I realized that I could do something more with my life than I ever had imagined because I don't think I ever looked too far into the future before coming here because people in my family really didn't go to college so it wasn't something that was on my radar. And then when I started coming here, I realized that it was an option for me and that if I wanted to and tried hard enough I could succeed so that's how it changed things for me. I frequently get amazed by the circle that I've been through, that I started off here almost half of my life ago as a student and had no idea when I stepped foot on this campus how it was about to change my life and over the years I went to school here, and then I went away and got my degree, had all these other different jobs and I would have never known that I would end up right back in the place that changed my life and I couldn't be happier than to be here at MiraCosta.