Being successful in life does not solely depend upon how hard-working an individual is. Instead, there are some factors involved in it, for example, the number of opportunities that come your way, the cultural legacy of your society, the employment factor of your country, and even the saturation of your domain field in the market. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has, very reasonably, mentioned that opportunities do not knock the doors of everyone equally. Some individuals may get more chances than the others. Other than that, timing also plays a critical role in deciding the success of a person. Also, there is a concept that an individual needs to work for “10,000 hours” to become expert in an area. So basically, doing some meaningful work with the immense amount of dedication plays an imperative role in success but that in turn in is deeply rooted in the number of opportunities that knock your doors. We are blessed to study in one of the prestigious institutes, El Camino College, where we have a lot of opportunities around us. The rest of the paper will identify the role of such opportunities in the success of an individual.
El Camino College is located on the beautiful site at the corner of Manhattan Beach & Crenshaw boulevards in the vicinity of Torrance. It was opened about 60 years ago and is serving the educational needs of the community and grooming of culture since then. El Camino College puts in a lot of effort to train and polish their students so that they can make a constructive contribution towards community and country. For this reason, some opportunity-based programs have initiated that serves the students and help them build a better career. The upcoming discussion will highlight two most crucial opportunity based programs.
In El Camino College, we have a Financial Aid Office which is the heart of our institution since it introduces several schemes to help students and their families to register themselves and pay for their educational costs at college. Not every family can support the expenses of higher educational institutions and hence, Financial Aid Office provides students with several assistance programs that pay for their fee, books, transportation, and hostels in the form of grants, US scholarships, and loans, etc. Recently, the office launched Puente Project Mission which aims to increase the number of students who are educationally under-served. The main idea behind it is to let those students complete their four years education from colleges or universities serve their community as a leader and front-runner for the upcoming generations. Puente students take English instruction classes and counseling sessions from Puente counselors. Then they are assigned a Puente mentor that helps them develop professionally.
The second significant opportunity based program is Career Center which provides counseling to the students regarding their career and helps them grow professionally. It is located on the first floor of Students Services Center in the Counselling Office. Students are highly encouraged to attend the sessions of Career Center as they help to inspire students to achieve their life goals through self-exploration. They boost the students to have a more in-depth look at their values, personality traits, and aptitude skills before taking a step into future. The staff and faculty provide quality comprehensive counseling sessions to the students.
The programs mentioned in this paper are just two of the many opportunity based programs that are available at El Camino College. If an educational institution takes so much interest in the future and professional grooming of their students, there is a very high chance that good opportunities will open gateway towards success for them.
REFERENCES
1. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
2. About El Camino College, www.elcamino.edu/about/.
