Intro Letter of Courtney

My name is Courtney Whyte and I call myself a California native, but that is not necessarily true. I was born Vail, Colorado, but moved here when I was two months old. I lived in Vista until the end of first grade and then moved to Oceanside. In Oceanside, I attended Vista Academy of Visual and Performing Arts from second grade through eighth grade. From there I went to Vista High School and graduated in 2003. Straight from high school I attended Palomar Community College and stayed there a little longer than most because I changed my major three times. I finally decided on a major and transferred to California State University San Marcos in the fall of 2007 and graduated two years later with my BA in Psychology. I am now in the process getting my prerequisites done for my masters in communicative sciences and disorders (speech pathology) and, with fingers crossed, the program will hopefully start in fall, 2010.

My experiences with technology are all over the board. I am very good with programs that I use daily such as word processing, email, internet, and now, thanks to the Psychology program, SPSS. However, there are a lot of programs that, as of now, I have had no use for so I am not very familiar with; nevertheless, with instruction or a little trial and error I tend to catch on rather quickly. I use technology daily, mostly for communication via email and phone or information via the Internet, and I feel lost without my computer or phone. Growing up, I was in a family of PC users and was fairly proficient using them. Later, we switched to Mac’s and now I feel completely helpless and confused when using a PC. The transition from a PC to a Mac was a little difficult but extremely worth it in the end… I love my Mac Book (I am now using Office 08 for Mac’s).

To be completely honest, this is the first time that I have heard the College of Education’s Mission Statement, so I think it is fair to say that it did not influence my decision to apply to CSUSM. However, after reading it, I can say that the things the College of Education stands for are the exact things that I was looking for in a school, and I am happy that I ended up here. I think that the mission statement does not only represent the College of Education, but CSUSM as a whole. I believe that the commitments in the mission statement are extremely necessary and important, but I was especially touched by their commitment to student-centered education. I think that we want to believe that all education is student centered, but lets face it, this is not always the case. It is important to keep the needs of the students central and let the politics take the back seat.