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Community college became a life saver for Mesa man.Community college became a life saver for Mesa man Five years ago, Mesa resident Ryan Harlan couldn’t even get himself to first period.Today, he holds two associate degrees from Paradise Valley Community College and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree.Harlan, 24, dropped out during his super-senior year of high school and earned his GED two years later.One month after that, he enrolled at PVCC.Fast-forward to today, and he attends Arizona State University, where he studies software engineering.“It’s a huge difference — I never thought I’d get to where I am now,” Harlan said.“I really don’t know what happened, but I’m really glad that whatever happened did.… Now maybe I’ve overcorrected a little too much, but hey, I go to all my classes now instead of none of them.” Diagnosed with a chronic mental illness, Harlan struggled to get to class throughout middle and high school, attending less than two weeks of his sophomore, junior and senior years.As a gifted student in primary school, college was always a possibility, he said, despite the fact that it wasn’t at the top of his list in high school.rail2.jpg Ryan Harlan was a high school dropout who found new purpose at Paradise Valley Community College.“Education kind of just fell out the window,” Harlan said, explaining that rather than looking toward the future, he was focused on getting through the present.Sometime after dropping out of high school, he began working in the produce department of a Fry’s grocery store — and it didn’t take long for him to realize he wanted more.“While I initially liked working there, and I really liked the people, the work was very taxing on the body,” Harlan said.“You’re lifting probably 5,000 to 8,000 pounds of stuff every shift, and my body felt that and I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, so I ended up getting my GED.” One month after earning his GED, he was enrolled at PVCC, where he would go on to earn associate degrees in mathematics and computer science.“I had no academic record worth considering, so community college was the only way to get my foot in the door,” Harlan said.At PVCC, smaller class sizes meant more time with professors who were deeply experienced in their fields.More importantly, they engaged closely with students and knew how to explain difficult concepts in ways that went beyond textbook language.Harlan said that made all the difference.“You’re not in a class of 200 … being taught by a TA (Teaching Assistant) who’s a graduate.student,” Harlan said.“You’re being taught by a professor who has probably at least a decade of teaching experience and a master’s.So they’re good at what they do, and they know how to help struggling students.” One of those professors was Dr.Casey Durandet, a nearly three-decade researcher at Fermilab—the nation’s premier particle physics laboratory—who spends her regular semesters teaching physics at PVCC.It was Durandet, Harlan said, who pushed him to explore physics they hadn’t gone over in class and apply his learning in the real world — ultimately sparking his interest in quantum computing.Not only did Harlan become a standout student at PVCC, but he took it one step further, trading his job at Fry’s for a supplemental instruction leader and teaching assistant position.One of his math professors offered the job, stopping Harlan in the hall as he was headed to a Phi Theta Kappa honor society meeting.For a year and a half, Harlan led study sessions and assisted in college algebra courses — a class he had already taken himself.“The hardest part of calculus is not calculus, it’s algebra,” Harlan said.“So just being in class, and relearning it all over again gave me mastery over it, and that mastery really helped me in my own education.” Harlan said the path he’s on now wouldn’t have been possible without the community, mentorship, and affordability he found at PVCC.That support paid off in ways Harlan didn’t expect when he got to ASU.On his first day of classes, he approached one of his professors and asked whether transfer students from community colleges tend to struggle with certain concepts or come in lacking anything.He was surprised to hear the professor say that community college transfer students are often much better prepared.“I will say, based on talking with my classmates, that is indeed the case,” Harlan said.For all of his hard work at PVCC, Harlan was awarded the All-Arizona Academic Team scholarship—a 60-credit tuition waiver that now covers his costs at ASU, where he hopes to eventually pursue a master’s degree.It’s relief he isn’t taking for granted after working through community college to pay his tuition and fees.Community colleges, said Vince Yanez, senior vice president of community engagement and strategic partnerships at Helios Education Foundation, are uniquely built for students like Harlan.“Community colleges do an amazing job of understanding that over half of their students are likely to be part-time students, because they also have to work either part-time or a full-time job,” Yanez said.“They build their core structure around that to make sure they’re accommodating those students, whether they’re traditional students right out of high school or whether they’re working adults who are coming back and trying to further their education.” Harlan said the takeaway value of community colleges is simple.“Community college is not just cheaper, but you also get a better education — a better foundation — that you can then go to a four-year university to get your bachelor’s in what you want,,” he said.