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The window to the counselor’s office rises and the line already queued up at 8:00 a.m. lurches forward. The students are tired, but driven, after having made it past the admissions desk, the registration desk, the placement tests, and the late summer morning’s siren song of more sleep.The people at the front desk, gatekeepers to the campus, call them forward and assign them walk-up appointments, the equivalent of a Wonka golden ticket a little more than a week before school starts.

Hours later, Tylesa Cowan, an 18-year-old incoming freshman is wandering the halls of the L building with little else in mind than meeting with a counselor. She wants to be excited for the upcoming semester, but she’s finding the registration process daunting.

“Instead of waiting in line, I’d just like to see someone. I’m new here and now I have to wait all the way until school starts to talk to someone. I’ll have to come back at three on Monday,” she says as she mills around the hall by the transfer center, waiting for her placement test results with friends who form a makeshift support group for her.

“I just want to go here for my two years, then transfer,” she says, sounding prematurely fatigued by the ins ands outs of the campus.

But she gets a little more cheery when she hears about the possibility of adding classes and when she considers where her time at PCC will take her, she smiles and says, “I want to go Ole Miss, to be near my grandmother, who lives nearby there.”

Cowan’s not the only one waiting to register until the 11th hour. Once she finds those in-demand classes, she’ll be one of the many students starting PCC for the first time this semester.

The stress of becoming a college student isn’t where it ends for many. For quite a few incoming freshmen, this coming semester coincides with them striking out on their own and all the accompanying post-parent worry and bliss.

Julio Montalvo is one of them. The 18-year-old, currently undeclared, sits at a computer at the Student Affairs center and reviews a fall full of firsts.

The La Mirada native speaks proudly of his apartment of two days, just blocks away from the school, a place shared with roommates whose respective holds on tidiness remains to be seen.

“Living on your own is pretty cool, except the whole waking up to dirty dishes thing. That’s not so cool. I pray to God that my roommates aren’t dirty,” he says.

Having a place of his own hasn’t really hit him yet, though he’s receiving the full brunt of his sister’s anger. “She pretty much hates me now for moving out. She posted some bulletin on Myspace, like, ‘I hate my brother,'” he says with a laugh.

As for school, he’s all nervous energy. “I have a pretty busy schedule this semester. I want to get the gist of things here first,” he says.

“The most difficult part of this whole registration process has definitely been selecting courses. I’m really nitpicky. I don’t want to find out later that I took all of these courses and it wasn’t necessary or that I screwed up and did something wrong,” he says.

He’s got his classes printed out on a folded sheet of paper, on a mission to get his books, used if possible. He wonders what his professors are like and marvels when he’s shown ratemyprofessor.com. His math professor’s got one of those lukewarm green-colored smileys, a middling success according to a jury of his students.

“Well, that’s not bad,” he says, shrugging his shoulders and scrolling down. As he reads, he notes the extremity of opinion from fans and detractors alike and hopes that he’ll fall somewhere on the side of support.

The freshman’s got his priorities in order, balancing hard work (though he hasn’t quite decided on a major, he’s intent on taking every business class he can) with a little credit-earning fun.

“I want to make sure I wake up for all my classes. I just want to be able do well. I want to keep my desire to do well intact. And no matter what, I need to take a music class this year. I’m a musician and I took a lot of music classes in high school, so no matter what happens, I don’t want to give that up,” he says, convincingly.

When Ronnie Tumua, a physical education major, says, “This is all new to me,” he’s not telling the half of it. The soft-spoken 18-year-old football player with a lion’s build just arrived in California two weeks ago from Missouri and now it’s off to college.

“I’m on my own now. College is so different from high school, anyway, but I’m coming from Missouri, out-of-state and life is so much faster here. The people are friendly, but it’s crazy,” he offers, as he waits patiently with some of his football friends near the registration desk.

When he explains the reason for his move, he does it with a casual confidence. “I was looking for a change of scenery, a new area, because I was tired of Missouri. I’m too young to settle down. I want to travel — me and my girlfriend want to go to France after school,” he says.

Before he gets too ahead of himself, he maps out his plans for PCC.

“I want to knock out my GEs. I really like this school so far. It’s pretty nice and a lot of big-time players have come here, too.”

Besides going to school, he’s got to find a job to pay the rent for his currently roommate-less apartment (he jokingly rules out his football friends as housemates).

“I’ve gotta find a job. I was officiating, which means I was a referee at hockey games – a middle school league. I’d like to get a similar job here,” he says.

He loves living alone and he’s game for his first semester of college, but like many students living by themselves for the first time, he misses his family.

“That’s the hard part. They were really surprised when I told them I was leaving. They said, ‘You’re really going to do this?’ but eventually it was, ‘If you’re ready, you’re ready.’ And I’m ready,” he says, no-nonsense and self-assured.

Students brave the lines at the Records destk in the L buildings. (Jeremy Balan)

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