Letter from former student

 I am actually grading essays...here is a surprise..

 

Dr. Coates

There are thousands of people around the world who would love the opportunity to attend college. I fortunately was blessed with the opportunity that most from my area did not get. The area I came from there are three choices that you have coming out of school. You either received a scholarship for an athletic or academic purpose, go and get a regular nine to five job, or get involved in street activities. Since the end of my senior years I have witnessed three of the people who I use to associate myself with shot and two dead. God has had favor over my life and blessed me with athletic abilities to be able to receive an athletic scholarship to a public ivy school.

Before coming to college Ive always seen movies of how college would be. Coming on my official visit to Miami I learned a lot about the college and how prestigious this college really is. It has one of the top business schools in the United States. I learned how much a degree from this school meant in the business world after graduation. Soon after getting on campus I found out exactly how difficult the classes will be with a course held by Dr. Coates. At the high school I graduated from we would write three and four page papers and really think that we wrote a lot and accomplished something. I soon found out in this class that that was just a nights worth of work if you did not want to get the “bare minimum” grade. In this class I was taught how to become a scholar and I was held to such standards. Everyone in the class was required to study two to three hours a day for this class and then submit a complete analysis on an article that was assigned on top of asking and answering two questions that you had on the assigned topic. In todays society athletes are not seen as scholars so for the athletes that go through this class I believe we can be the select few that have the right to be classified as such.

Society has a lot of things messed up with the realm of sports and the things that pertain to them. For instance the majority of athletes are black while the coaches and owners tend to all be white. This again shows how we still live in this slave mentality environment, where black men and women go out to get money for the white master or “owner”. I compare these relations to those of sharecroppers. There are many kids in rough neighborhoods that view playing sports as their only way out or their only way to do something positive and get their parents out of those rough environments. Most of their mindsets does not elevate to attempt to try something different to make money because this is the only way they know, and the only way they know to make it out. I believe society has placed this stigma on black people as being athletes, so growing up this is the only thing we believe we have to be. We see people like LeBron James, or Michael Vick and try to become them believing that the only way, when in actuality less than 2% of those kids will make it professional. We don’t let ourselves find out what we can be in life because we are busy striving to be someone that we see on television that look like us, not knowing it’s a black representative we can strive to be or a black businessman we can become. I am thankful for the teaching and the practice that I had coming into college, and in my final semester I can honestly say I really appreciate the course that I took that helped me prepare for this long journey