Jake’s Take: A Bittersweet Homecoming

Revisiting a brief, but important chapter of my life long before STLCC

JACOB POLITTE MANAGING EDITOR

Long before my tenure at STLCC, I gave another higher institution of learning the good old college try.

I guess at this stage of my life, I’m what many would consider a nontraditional student. Just a week short of turning 27 years old, I’m a bit older than a significant portion of students that are currently on campus. And before my return to my college education a few years ago, and prior to a long break before that return, I spent a school year living on and attending classes at the campus of Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO).

Revisiting that year is hard to talk about. It was my first time being away from home, and I did not make many good choices. Some resentment of those bad choices has faded over time, and some have largely remained but shaped the person I’ve become since.

My time at SEMO, though, taught me a lot about being independent and learning to take care of my issues on my own. It taught me that time management is impeccable and of the dangers of procrastination. I learned very quickly how to set up a television. It taught me that the music videos only show up on MTV at 3:00am. And it taught me a lot of other things that you can only learn living away from home.

But it also taught me that if you’re not serious about your education, that the system itself can be rather ruthless. I remember during my original orientation, how an older lady (I’m fairly sure she was the Dean of Students at the time) said that half of us wouldn’t make it through 4-years at the college. I thought it was a harsh, stoic reminder that success isn’t guaranteed, and I also thought she was full of crap. Who was this woman and why did she just tell me the odds are stacked against me right out of the gate? I made it a personal mission to prove this woman wrong.

And then I failed that mission.

I lasted one year at SEMO. I crashed and burned extremely hard at the end of my first semester, due to a lot of different factors that don’t warrant mention here (I’m fairly transparent about most things, but I think some stuff should stay private). At the end of the day though, it was my fault that I didn’t succeed, no matter the people or circumstances that I may have blamed at the time. After playing a game of catch-up the following semester, one C grade in my World Religions class sealed my fate… my financial aid was toast.

Over the next three years, I spent my time working mindless full-time jobs, including a factory job and my current job working at a Wallis Companies location. The latter especially offers steady pay and little travel, and quite a few of my customers are actually really big fans and regular readers of this publication. But retail in particular makes a worker extremely disillusioned. Even so, I was scared to go back to school, especially because SEMO wasn’t an option. Sometimes messing up something on that scale leaves a man truly frightened to fail at anything else again.

It took awhile, but of course I ended up at STLCC, and I’ve had so many great opportunities and accomplishments here that I’m very proud of. Even so, my time at SEMO still left me largely unsatisfied. I didn’t like the way I left, and I never really got to properly say goodbye.

But a recent conference for this very organization has allowed me to receive a small measure of closure this past weekend. This year’s Missouri College Media Association Conference (MCMA) was my first one, and coincidentally was held at the SEMO campus. No one from my time there was left, but the buildings were all still in the same place that they were when I departed. It was a surreal rush of emotion seeing them all again, with eight long years of experiences separating my time there.

In particular, looking up at the eleventh floor window in Towers East where I lived was more emotional than I expected it to be. I spent a whole year of my life looking out of that window every morning. Someone put nice curtains in there, which is a lot better of a design choice than I made.

The Montage took home 22 awards at Saturday night’s banquet. I’m very proud of that. And I’m very proud of my staff. I don’t regret a second of my time here, even if I didn’t ever plan on being here. SEMO was the plan and that plan went awry.

But SEMO taught me a lot about how to handle certain things properly, and how to not handle other things. It may not have ended the way I would have wanted it to, but I learned a lot there. And I’m glad I got the chance to achieve some sort of closure.