Rarely do students have an opportunity to experience the birth of a college and watch it grow. De Anza students this coming year will be doing something more than watching. They’ll be shaping a college, starting traditions, creating ideas, formulating clubs, determining in large part the direction this college will take in the coming years.

Perhaps you’re here to enroll in a technical program, or perhaps you want to transfer to another college and you want to save your money. The idea of fighting in jungles 8,000 miles away doesn’t grab you, or maybe you’re here just to take a few courses for the sheer enjoyment, although no one believes you.

You’ve chosen De Anza because you now instructors here do nothing but teach, and aren’t harassed by any “publish or perish” rule, and the prospect of getting lost in a huge multiversity does not appeal to you, for the moment at least.

Or perhaps you’re here because you have nowhere else to go or you were turned down by another college. The “open door” policy of De Anza offends you, and you feel somewhat inferior to your friends at State or UC because you are in a “junior” college.

The wealth of statistics that you’ve heard (82 percent of all freshmen and sophomores in California go to a junior college, junior colleges educate three times the number of very top students that UC does, junior college students o better after transferring to four-year institutions than do students wo enrolled there in their freshman year, etc., etc.) doesn’t do anything to you, but then again, your problem isn’t one of the quality of education anyway, is it?

Whatever your reason for choosing De Anza, welcome. Five years in the making, De Anza was built for the student. Let’s hope this coming year will be a real success.

Archived from Volume 1, Issue 1.