In the middle of December, many people take the time to reflect on the past year while looking to find resolutions for the next. However, there are still many accomplishments from 2023, both big and small, that Frederick Community College students were proud to look back on and share.
Some high school students dipped their academic careers in the college level for the first time this semester.
Senior Dual Enrollment student Marcia Nuné from Linganore said she was happy with her academic work.
“It was different than high school,” said Nuné, “but I was happy I could keep up with my classes and everything,” she said.
Sani Momllet, a junior Dual Enrollment student from Gaithersburg explained how they had pressure from their parents to do great this semester. Luckily, Momllet felt like they met their expectations.
“I know my professor for my English class said that I was one of his best students out of his 100-plus, and I’m also one of his youngest,” Momllet said, “I also did very well in statistics, better than I expected.”
For others, the transition from high school to adult life was enough to feel proud of.
Meanwhile, Jason Gnaha, of Brunswick said “I was happy with graduating high school in the spring, even though I didn’t do any clubs or sports, it’s something I’m proud of.”
Amiah Sydnor, 22, a human services major from North Carolina said she was happy to purchase her own car and find an apartment for herself.
Eliza Johnston, 20, a social studies major from Frederick said she was happy to break out of her shell and make new friends.
“Throughout high school and in general it takes me a while to consider someone a friend,” Johnston said. “I think maybe I opened up a little bit more this year and I got lucky meeting some people early in the semester and it built up from there.”
Ethan Nelsen, a psychology major from Frederick, shared his ambitions to transfer to another college in 2024, set up from the hard work he put in this past year.
“I have enough to pay for the next semester and a plan to start paying for transfer school. I’m thinking of transferring to Hood,” he said.
Nelsen also explained how he managed to overcome his typical procrastination for doing schoolwork this fall semester at FCC.
“Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of work done faster,” he said.
Plenty of students also have skills they love to master both in and outside the classroom. For Iverson Panchecho and Toni Quill, those skills culminated in two of their largest projects ever.
Quill, 20, of Frederick said ne was happy with completing a final project in an Intro to Mass Communications course. The project required students to create a narrative that could be adapted into two different forms of media. For the first media piece Quill wrote two short stories. Quill explained the process for creating a website for the second media piece, “I’ve done some coding before, but I’d never put so much work into coding a website. I edited photos to make it look old timey.”
Iverson Panchecho Fuentes, 20, of Silver Spring said he’s excited to be in the pre-production phase of an upcoming independent film project he’s creating with a good group of friends.
“I enjoy it because this group of people is giving me an opportunity to work on something that I’m very excited about,” Fuentes said. “They also have great ideas to put into the film and they will be very helpful in writing ideas and finding actors. We’ll also be trying different choreographing and filming techniques than what I’m used to. I’m getting out of comfort zone.”
