Our Stories

Our Stories

Angela Angell,
General Studies/Liberal Arts, 2007
Krysta Schwuchow,
Graphic Design, 2008
Blaze Sanders,
Engineering Sciences, 2008
Eduardo Garza,
Engineering Sciences, 2008
Jack Keck,
Liberal Arts and Sciences – Social Sciences, 2008
Justine Lewis,
Human Services, 2008
Rose Dovi,
Graphic Arts, 2008
Harold Higgins,
Award-Winning Writer, 1970
Seth A. Thompson,
Director of Multicultural Services
Amber Coulthart,
Liberal Arts and Sciences – Childhood Education 2007
Matt Sierra,
Computer Support Specialist, 2008
Tricia Goodenough,
Non-Traditional Student
Scott Ochs,
Professor, Criminal Justice/Sociology

Harold Higgins

Award-Winning Writer, 1970

One of TC3’s first graduates happens to also be one of the school’s most accomplished.
Harold Higgins, a Homer Central High School graduate, enrolled in TC3’s first class in 1968 and went on to a successful career as a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher. Higgins was the commencement speaker at TC3’s 2007 spring graduation ceremony.

“I was a freshly minted graduate of Homer Central High School in 1968, and I really wasn’t all that interested in going to college. I was ambivalent about it,” Higgins says. A guidance counselor’s effort to secure a scholarship to TC3 for Higgins swayed him toward the school, which was located in Groton at the time (TC3 moved to Dryden in 1974).

The experience set Higgins on the path to academic and professional success.

“The first couple of semesters at TC3 where I learned how to study, how to learn things, how to remember information, were so important to me later on in my academic career, whether I got a fellowship at Missouri or Arizona,” Higgins says. “But for me the acid test came actually when I was about 50 years old, when I went to Stanford University to the graduate school of business in the Stanford executive program, which is a truncated MBA for business executives who are already company presidents or vice presidents,” Higgins says. “… Our class was more than 50 percent international executives … . I was a little cautious about the academic high-quality of everyone else, coming from Cambridge, and from Harvard, and Yale. But what I found once I got to Stanford and started in the studies was that I was very competitive with my fellow students in being able to assimilate information, digest it, and make sense of it, and try to create some sort of new vision out of all that information.

“And I thought about that … and (in talking with other executives) I ran across several who had gone to community colleges, including several international executives.”