Spending four years learning a vocation is a lot different than attending a standard local high school. So, was this the best choice for me?
When I was deciding where to go for high school as an eighth grader, I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t get into technical school so I wouldn’t have to make the choice. I ended up not receiving my acceptance letter on time and had to make the decision in a day. I wanted to try something new and I always liked horses, so I thought going to school to learn about horses would be fun. It turns out that horses are a lot of work and are not my life’s calling. After enrolling and spending the first half of my freshman year exploring the different “shops” or programs, I was ultimately placed in equine science to learn about horses for the rest of my high school career.
A lot of people will never know the experience of switching between your shop and academic classes every other week, starting on Wednesdays. I got to know my equine science teachers and classmates very well as we spent every other week together and we learned about a skill together that we all had some interest in. However, I lost my passion and interest in equine science after my sophomore year. Plenty of my peers experienced the same thing with their shops too. As one can imagine, there was also a fair amount of drama within each shop. Only a few people from my shop are continuing their equine education, though more of them still actively work with horses in some way. I did not intend on working with horses again, but I needed a job this past summer, so I ended up working at a horse barn. The program did effectively prepare me to work comfortably with horses.
A cool part of my school is that we could do paid co-ops or unpaid internships and go work in our related fields every other week instead of going to our shop classes. In my junior year, I did an internship at an equine therapeutic farm. So instead of going to my shop classes, I went to this horse barn to assist in therapeutic equine classes and help at the barn. This is a unique experience that you may only find at a technical school. The school pushes for real-world experience, and so while they may not have helped me with SAT prep, they were trying to prepare me for a career after graduating. Though, some shops can better prepare you for a career more than others. Some people did paid co-ops and were offered full-time jobs right out of school.
If I went to my local high school, I probably would have continued studying German, been active in band, and gotten to know my hometown peers better. Or at least that’s what I imagine. Farm school sounds great, but you miss out on the fun, random art, language, and music classes you would take at a local high school. You miss out on the community aspect too; whereas the school I went to was so divided based on shops, what towns people were from, and the clubs they were in.
The AP classes were rushed because there were fewer days of academic classes and not many of them were offered. Coming to college and hearing about the advanced classes my college friends took honestly made me feel a little inferior. My academic education was cut short because half of the time I was in shop. I don’t enjoy math and science that much, but maybe I would enjoy them more if I got a better education.
High school and our adolescent lives are about learning and figuring out who we are and what we want to do. There is no way to experience both kinds of high schools, so at the end of the day, every eighth grader just has to pick one. I have a lot of fond memories of equine with my friends hanging out in the tack room, free-lunging horses, and working on projects together. I know that my unique experiences gave me knowledge that not a lot of people have. I was still able to go to college and found a new interest to study, but I’ll always have the knowledge from equine science if I ever want to go back. So no, I do not regret going to an agricultural and technical school, but I know that choice largely impacted who I am today.
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