Lorinda Kalajian

Transfer Student

By Lorinda Kalajian

I never thought I would find the right school. At first, taking online classes allowed me to work at the same time. I took this path as a way to make sure my younger siblings knew what they were doing with their lives. However, taking online classes worked until life and distractions kept pulling me.

The Berkshires has alway been a place that I’ve felt the most at home. My family and I would come out here for vacations as one of our favorite places. It was becoming harder and harder to ignore the need, the want to stay. I have been applying to jobs and getting them at home that have a counterpart out here. I’ve been fantasizing about moving out here for ten years. In the spring of 2016, it had gotten too hard to ignore, it is then that I started looking for schools out here that had a dorm.

MCLA popped up from my internet search. I put in what my interests were and it just took off from there. I was excited to get the information pack. I signed up for one of the tours. I came out here for the first time by myself. I wanted to make sure it was something that I really wanted before telling anyone in my family about it.

It turned out to be something that I wanted and more. The next time I was asked to come to another tour, I brought my mother along with me. She never thought she would get her oldest out of the house. It was also this time I learned that I was too old to live in a dorm.

My heart nearly sank. A dorm was part of the reason of what I was looking at in a school, besides being a small school. However, I also knew that going to a closer school was not an option. I needed to get out of the house. I needed the same taste of freedom that both of my sisters had gotten.

I had to work hard to get everything in order to live and go to school out here. I saved enough money and got my grades released from the online school. Since I now had to find an apartment, I had to save money and supplies for that too. Ugh! No pressure, right?