For my last trip to a college campus, I wanted to experience a college atmosphere that may be completely different. After pondering how I could accomplish this for a while, I came up with the idea of visiting a community college instead of a regular university. So for my last stop I spent some time at the Community College of Allegheny County.

The first thing that I noticed about the structure of the campus was that there was only one building. Don't get me wrong, this building was pretty large, but I didn't like how there was no separation at all. CCAC just reminded me of a high school. I ended up being able to go inside of the building and the cafeteria was in the basement, which I found odd. It was like a dungeon down there and it reminded me of a prison cafeteria. Directly next to this was the computer lab which only housed approximately 20 computers. After leaving the dungeon, I made my way upstairs and each floor pretty much consisted of classrooms that again reminded me of a high school.

While exploring the building, I noticed that there was not a good vibe. The atmosphere was dull and everyone looked miserable. I would assume that is because most students only go to CCAC for two semesters to save money and then transfer to a lager school. I ended up talking to a girl named Ashley. Like I thought, Ashley was only at CCAC because her parents were making her pay for her entire college tuition and she wanted to save some cash. She explained to me that the classes at CCAC were really easy and a lot of the teachers seemed under-qualified to teach college level courses. I asked her if everyone was as miserable as they seemed and she said that she didn't believe so. She thought that most people had the same attitude as she did, which was to take it as it is for now and look forward to a new school.

It was when I was approaching my car to leave that I decided to take one final look at CCAC. I was once again surprised at how much this institution resembled a high school. I then thought to myself that UPJ may not be the greatest school on earth, but there are many places that are worse off than it. At this point I felt grateful that I was a mountain cat and was excited to get back to my school because when it comes to CCAC, if I want to go back to high school I can just look through an old year book.