College Experience and Finding Your Voice with Cottey Student Makenzie Seiler

Makenzie Seiler is a third-year psychology major and exercise science minor, a volleyball player, and has aspirations of becoming an occupational therapist. In this interview, she shares her educational experience, thoughts on attending a women’s college, and offers a glimpse into the life of a Cottey student.

Why Cottey?
I visited Cottey because one of my volleyball teammates in high school wouldn’t shut up about it. She kept saying how pretty the campus was, but I didn’t take her seriously. When I finally relented and visited Cottey, well… she was right. I immediately fell in love!

But! There was a problem: Cottey is a women’s college, and I wasn’t sure what to think about that. Sometimes in my head it didn’t seem like a big deal, but other days I was worried there would be a lot of drama and it would be hard to make friends.

I decided to enroll at Cottey, anyway. The campus really wowed me, and everyone seemed nice. Spoiler alert: I am glad I did! Going to a women’s college has been an amazing fit for me, so here’s some benefits of attending Cottey, and women’s colleges in general, from my experience.

Benefit #1-Everyone is Really Supportive
Everything was the opposite of what I thought. In a crazy twist of fate, the students actually support and care about each other here! It’s been comically easy to make friends and find study partners, and when I was new, my classmates were genuinely interested in getting to know me.

A surprising benefit: this has honestly made it easier to take on a college workload. On Cottey’s campus, there’s this sense that we’re all in it together, and not only are the professors very approachable, but the students often band together to study and help one another with projects.

Benefit #2-Speak Up!
I feel like there are a lot less distractions in the classroom than in high school. I don’t know if it’s just a high school thing or a boy thing, but sometimes it felt like the boys would be really loud in class. That would make it hard to pay attention, but even more importantly, loud boys made me not want to speak up. I was afraid they’d make fun of me.

At Cottey, the classes are a lot smaller, and it feels like everyone cares about their education. When everyone in the room is buying in and engaged, it is such a game changer. Instead of fighting through static while I’m trying to learn, I’m being pulled along by my classmates’ enthusiasm. That kind of thing gives you opportunities to piggyback off your friends’ questions and spurs you forward to ask your own. It makes the learning environment rich and more thorough, like I’m getting a deeper understanding of the topic.

If you want to go to college and hide in the back of the room, Cottey probably isn’t the school for you. But if you want to go and really learn your field of study, inside and out, asking all the messy questions and getting all the details, then Cottey is a wonderful choice.

Benefit #3- Job Preparation
The whole point of college is to prepare you for a job, right? Two things about Cottey stand out to me:

1. I am becoming less timid.
2. The career services center helps me find internships to try things and discover what I like.

I am a pretty shy person. In the previous section, I talked about how Cottey has helped me speak up more often, and I feel like that’s going to pay huge dividends when I settle into a career. I just feel much more capable now that I’m not scared to step out of my comfort zone. Cottey provides a safe, controlled environment where no one is going to laugh at me, and that’s a great way to find your voice.

Secondly, I did an internship at the local hospital through Cottey’s Career Services Center, and it was so beneficial in helping me learn what I did and didn’t like. I got to shadow physical therapists, speech therapists, language pathologists, and occupational therapists, observing what they do every day.

Before this internship, I was bouncing back-and-forth between occupational therapy and physical therapy. Seeing both in real life helped me realize my passion was in occupational therapy. That experience was invaluable!