Nonso

It was March 2020, junior year of high school. It was snowing, and Nonso Agum was staring out the window of his U.S. Government class. Then parents started arriving to pick their kids up early. He noticed the absences, wondering for the first time if there was something to this talk about a virus.

Nonso expected to go home for a day or so. But coronavirus had different plans. He never went back to his high school, and completed the rest of junior and senior year online. Like so many people in the pandemic, he had a stressful few months figuring out how to study from home. Eventually, though, he learned to balance home and work.

But as high school finished, he didn’t really have a plan for college. He hadn’t finished the SATs or ACTs yet, having pushed them off until the end of junior year; now in the pandemic they weren’t available. A mentor from David Douglas encouraged him to apply for the Future Connect program, which offers scholarships to PCC.

“I didn't even do any research on it,” laughs Nonso. He signed up and got assigned to a College Success Coach, with whom he made an immediate connection.

“She motivated me to stick around for [college],” he admits.

He started at PCC in 2021. Because he began his college studies online, Nonso doesn’t feel like he belongs to a PCC community. He goes to class, he learns, he logs off; he enjoys his instructors and classmates, but doesn’t really feel close to them.

Despite the lack of connection, he makes a real effort to be engaged with his studies. For Nonso, such enthusiasm is a deliberate method: “If you fully invest yourself in it, you get something out of it, but if you kind of don't invest yourself in the little things, it can feel like it's not worth it,” he says. He learned this lesson finishing high school online and has applied it to his time at PCC. For Nonso, investment means participating in everything from class discussion boards to small talk in the Zoom chat. He shows up to keep himself motivated.

“With the pandemic it's separated people from the usual type of relationships that you'd have [in college],” he muses. “So even the littlest of things, I kind of get excited about.”

Another way Nonso generates motivation is through focusing on his goals. He’s not a short-term planner; he prefers to think way ahead. Those long-term goals keep him focused because he is “able to plan out a few months and actually see a little bit of progress and what I'm doing over the year.”

His current long-term goal? A degree in Computer Information Systems (CIS). He considered politics and economics, but “it kind of just missed the computer geek part” of me, he says.

“If you have an interest in something I think you do okay,” he says. And computers interest him. He loves to fiddle with them, take them apart, and play with technology: “That's just how my brain kind of operates.”