Alumni Stories
Video Transcript
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Aaron Kahn-Bork '13: I was diagnosed with, I think, ADHD first, at a very young age, like, I think very early elementary school or kindergarten.
Meredith Davis '13: Made it through elementary school and high school, went to Smith College right after high school, where I promptly failed three out of four semesters.
Kahn-Bork: I was a rising senior in high school. My mother found Landmark. She really wanted me to go to college here, and I said, "No I'm going to go to a traditional college. There's no way I'm going there." She convinced me to try the high school program during the summer, and that was an okay compromise for me. I was willing to give it a shot. I came here and I absolutely fell in love with this place.
Jennilee Smarrow '06: Looking for colleges my senior year, my mom said, "You have either a choice to go to a community college or Landmark College."
James Stockwell '14: Before this, I went to NHTA, and I was, I was doing okay there, but once I figured out what I wanted to do—science and the medical field—I really started to struggle.
Davis: I was gonna come for one semester, and then that changed to my coming for two semesters, and then I decided I was going to stay for all two years.
David Grinage '13: I came to Landmark straight out of high school. I was kind of shy at first.
Smarrow: For a while, I always felt alone, that no one was going through what I went through.
Stockwell: As soon as I got here, the the stigma that I was worried about really dissipated.
Grinage: The main thing I miss about Landmark is the community.
Davis: Some people have been bullied their whole lives prior to coming here. They've been the, you know, the odd person out. And you get here and everyone gets it. Like, everyone has something, and it doesn't matter what it is, but everyone can relate to each other because of that. And a lot of people, you know, end up with a huge group of friends for the first time, and it's this great experience that also helps the academic side, because—I don't know—I don't do well academically when I'm really miserable.
Kahn-Bork: Landmark provided me with the kind of supportive environment I needed to really push through all this and grow and see that I could do it.
Stockwell: After I flourished at Landmark, I transferred to Franklin Pierce University, and I'm doing really well there.
Davis: I graduated with my associate's degree in the spring of 2013 and went back to Smith, and I just graduated this spring with my bachelor's.
Grinage: Now I'm at SUNY Plattsburgh working on my BFA, but I'll hopefully have done by fall 2016.
Smarrow: I never thought I would say have a master's degree. It still hasn't hit me yet, but learning the skills that I learned from Landmark College really helped me to succeed and to advocate for myself.
Davis: I wasn't afraid anymore to really ask professors things, even if it was in the middle of class. I've stopped professors and say, "Can you, you know, can you reword that? I just didn't quite understand it the way you said it." And I wasn't embarrassed anymore.
Smarrow: Learning is still a struggle for me—it will always be a struggle for me—but I know that I know what resources I need to do in order to succeed.
Kahn-Bork: What Landmark really did for me is it showed me that I can succeed, and how I can succeed, because for me I sort of see every day in school as an opportunity to give up, because it's that hard, and it wears on me. But I don't give up, and I think a lot of that is because of my time at Landmark.
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