{ THE EDUC A TION REVIEW }

C

ollege student sehrish shah

perched on a well-worn chair in a student activities lounge and pulled markers and glitter paint from her backpack. A white sheaf of poster board was spread on a table, and

several other students huddled around it, trying to tap latent artistic genes to create a poster for an upcom- ing event. ¶ The students, who represented different religious groups on campus, sketched a tree incorpo- rating religious symbols and words into the branches and trunk. They were promoting World Peace Day to foster the idea of various faiths working together. As they sketched, Shah and the other students talked about fundraising possibilities (a kissing booth was rejected), groaned about classes and compared par- ents’ discipline policies. ¶ It’s exactly the kind of college experience Shah, 20, imagined when she was a high school senior in Woodbridge: meeting different types of people, taking challenging class- es, getting involved in groups on campus, becoming a school leader. But as Shah packed up her papers, she headed home to her parents, not to a roommate and dorm room. And when she stepped out the door to a cold and misty day, she wasn’t leaving the confines of the leafy, traditional college campus that she had imagined while wearing her cap and gown at high school gradu- ation. Instead, the doors of North- ern Virginia Community College’s nondescript Woodbridge campus closed behind her. ¶ “My thing was that I worked hard in high school and I deserved to go straight to a four-year school,” she said. “I was judgmental in the beginning. Now that I look at it, I can’t believe I used to think that.”

24 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | April 11, 2010

Previous page: sehrish shah attends northern Virginia Community College. Above: shah, president of the Woodbridge campus’s Muslim student association, and others at a World Peace Day celebration.

Norma Kent of the American Association of Community Colleges and writer Michelle R. Davis will be online to

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