Being successful in life does not solely depend upon how hard-working an individual is. Instead, there are some factors involved, such as 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 on the doors of everyone equally. Some individuals may get more chances than others. Other than that, timing also plays a critical role in deciding a person’s success. Also, there is a concept that an individual needs to work for “10,000 hours” to become an expert in an area. So basically, doing some meaningful work with an immense amount of dedication plays an imperative role in success, but that, in turn, is deeply rooted in the number of opportunities that knock on 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 a beautiful site at the corner of Manhattan Beach & Crenshaw Boulevards in the vicinity of Torrance. It was opened about 60 years ago and has been 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 the community and country. For this reason, some opportunity-based programs have been initiated that serve the students and help them build better careers. The upcoming discussion will highlight two of the 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 register themselves and pay for their educational costs at college. Not every family can support the expenses of higher educational institutions, and hence, the Financial Aid Office provides students with several assistance programs that pay for their fees, books, transportation, and hostels in the form of grants, US scholarships, loans, etc. Recently, the office launched the Puente Project Mission, which aims to increase the number of educationally under-served students. The main idea behind it is to let those students complete their four years of education at colleges or universities and serve their community as a leader and front-runners for the upcoming generations. Puente students take English instruction classes and counselling sessions from Puente counsellors. Then, they are assigned a Puente mentor to help them develop professionally.
The second significant opportunity-based program is the Career Center, which provides counselling to students regarding their careers and helps them grow professionally. It is located on the first floor of the Students Services Center in the Counselling Office. Students are highly encouraged to attend the Career Center sessions as they help inspire students to achieve their life goals through self-exploration. They encourage the students to have a more in-depth look at their values, personality traits, and aptitude skills before taking a step into the future. The staff and faculty provide quality comprehensive counselling 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 a gateway towards success for them.
References
1. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
2. About El Camino College, www.elcamino.edu/about/.
