You, Me & NCCC with Jess

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Hi, everyone. I'm Jess Kemp, and I go to North Country Community College. In this video. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself, how I found out about North Country and what makes North Country Community College so special. Let's get started. Part one, about me. I was born and raised in Saranac Lake, New York, which is in the Adirondack Park in northern New York. So when people say upstate, they really mean here. I was in theater my entire life growing up. I played guitar, piano, bassoon, trombone. I sang, acted and danced. It's pretty much all I did in school. I did obviously a bunch of school. When I reached my senior year of high school, the only natural answer was, I'm going to go into theater. I felt the most at home in Boston, Massachusetts, so I went to school at Emerson College. I graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in stage and production management, and I also got a minor in hearing and deafness. After college, I had an internship in Louisville, Kentucky, where I had the best food of my life, and then I moved to New York City to continue pursuing a career in stage management. I kind of continued down that theater track for a long time, and then the world shut down and I didn't know what to do, so I came home to Saranac Lake, New York. I thought, this is a time for me to reevaluate what I want to do with my life. And ultimately I decided that I wanted to create a business that helped theater professionals save money. With no business degree, I thought, why not go back to school? And it was the best decision of my life, which is the perfect opportunity to talk about North Country Community College. So people ask me how I found out about North Country. But the truth is, I didn't find out about North Country. It's not something that I discovered or looked on Google for. My mom, a wonderful individual, was a professor at North Country Community College. I just kind of grew up there. Instead of coming home from school, I would go to her office and I would sit and do my homework and listen as she interacted with the professors, and I would listen as she interacted with her students to help them have the best experience that they could. North Country was just kind of a given. So why on earth what I try to tell you that North Country is an incredible place? Well, because it is. North Country Community College is a small community college that has three campus locations. We have one location in Saranac Lake, New York, where I'm from, and then we have a second in Malone, New York, and a third and Ticonderoga. These three campus locations all work to give you the best college experience possible. There are a bunch of different options at North Country and pretty unique ones. You can go to North Country for nursing, massage therapy, criminal justice. You could go to school for business. The North Country Community College experience is truly what you want it to be. Everybody has a different journey. None of us followed the same path to get here. There are single moms, single dads, people like me who haven't been to school in a really long time. People who just graduated high school. The benefit of small colleges, particularly North Country Community College, is that everyone on faculty, staff, students, they get to know you and they get to know your name. So you're not just a seat that's being filled. Your actual person with a life and a dream and a career that you aspire to. I wanted to choose a place that I knew would care about my education. I knew that if I went to North Country, I would meet the people who would help inspire me. It's a perfect building block for wherever you want life to take you next and that's it. Thank you for spending your time with me today. I hope you learned a little bit about North Country Community College, and what makes it such a unique place.