Editors’ Preface
The first edition of this book, A Different Road to College: A Guide For Transitioning To College For Non-traditional Students, was written by Alise Lamoreaux, an instructor at Lane Community College. The Chemeketa Community College edition of this book, was edited by Ashely Duran and Grecia Garcia. Some chapters on this book were also authored by Ashley Duran and Grecia Garcia and they were customized for you, a Chemeketa student. As you begin reading this e-book we hope that you find the chapters helpful when navigating college services at Chemeketa. You can find more about the authors and editors of the book towards the end of the book.
Grecia was teaching a Student Leadership Development class in which she taught college mentors how to mentor middle and high school students. One day she attended an Open Resource workshop at Chemeketa. At the workshop she found Alise’s book between a list of open resource books and Grecia adapted it to her curriculum in class. The students in the class found Alise’s book like a manual. In their words, “I wished I had this book when first starting college”. While most of the students in the class were non-traditional, even the traditional college students found this book to be a good guide everyone should have. While assigning chapters of the book, Grecia found students to be sort of editing the book by researching how the services mentioned in Alise’s book are accessed at Chemeketa. Not long after, the idea of a student in class became a formal idea.
However the idea could not have not taken form without the support from Alise’s who blessed us with her permission to edit her book. This e-book is written thanks to generosity of the Innovations Workgroup at Chemeketa Community College who granted Grecia with two grants to fund her efforts. One of the grants made Ashley’s hiring possible. Ashley did not only help with the edition of this book, she also authored multiple chapters. As a non-traditional Chemeketa student, and as an author of this edition of the book, Ashley came up with ideas of new chapters based on services students commonly use or we thought students should be aware to be successful at Chemeketa.
Special thanks to the staff at different student services at Chemeketa who kindly looked over the different chapters of this e-book and helped us double check our work. They are the true experts of their area. Also special thanks to the Textbook Affordability Committee at Chemeketa and the Innovations WorkGroup at Chemeketa who funded this project via the Innovation Fund Award.
This book took over two years to complete, and has a lot of room to grow. The chapters here are based only on a handful of services offered at Chemeketa for students to use and be successful. There are of course more services at Chemeketa that were not formally written into chapters. The edition of this book will be a never ending process, as services at Chemeketa change and a new services develop through the years. We invite students, instructors and staff to help us grow this e-book. As you read this book, we hope you also help us with the edit the book by letting us know of new changes to services at Chemeketa.
This book is the combination of efforts by many non-traditional students like Alise, like Ashley and like Grecia. We hope that you find this book helpful when navigating Chemeketa!
