A photo of the university’s Admission and Welcome Center.
Photo by Emma Wharton.
The university was not my first school of choice to transfer to.
Columbus State Community College holds nine Preferred Pathway partnerships with some of the top colleges in the state, including the university and Ohio State, the latter of which was my intended school to transfer to after I graduated from Columbus State.
As it turns out, I did not transfer to any university after I graduated, at least not for another year. Back then I told myself I just needed to recharge for some time, but the truth is I wasn’t really sure what to do when I received my associate’s degree.
I began attending Columbus State at the start of 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Ohio. The school transitioned over to online-only classes in March of that year, an experience which dampened my enthusiasm for attending college.
I was not particularly thrilled about the prospect of the first two years of my undergraduate education being relegated to sitting in front of a monitor. By the time I graduated in December 2021, I was only taking nine credit hours in my last semester thinking “I just want to get this over with.”
That’s not to say I had no plans after Columbus State; my eyes were still set on attending Ohio State. I decided I’d take a year off from schooling and take more shifts at work to provide financial security for myself in the intervening months.
A year after I graduated from Columbus State, I came across an article on the Dispatch detailing a new scholarship partnership between the university and Columbus State, allowing graduates to receive a full-ride scholarship to the university. I was intrigued, of course, but at that point I was still set on attending Ohio State.
Yet as the months passed, I’d continue to occasionally visit the university’s website, never quite finishing the application process. By the time summer rolled around, however, I had made my decision.
I chose the university primarily for two reasons, the first of which was that it was a relatively small school compared to Ohio State.
Ohio State had an enrollment of 60,046 students on its main campus in Columbus last year; the university had a mere 1,629 undergraduate students enrolled in the same time period. While this may be a drawback for some, I generally found the idea of attending a smaller-sized school appealing, primarily because that entailed having smaller class sizes, something which I had become accustomed to at Columbus State.
Attending the university also had the added benefit of a considerably less painful parking experience than what I would have gotten at a school Ohio State’s size.
My second reason for attending the university was the tempting Main Street Scholarship changes. As part of Columbus State’s agreement with the university, transfer students would have their tuition covered so long as they met a series of criteria: they maintained a 2.5 GPA (grade point average), are Ohio residents and are Pell Grant-eligible.
I do not regret having chosen the university over Ohio State. The relatively small size of its student body and campus, as well as its position at the heart of Bexley, was what eventually won me over.
