Marcus Carter

Hi, my name is Marcus Carter and I’m a junior taking classes at University of Maine at Rockland—URock– and I’m a junior in [UMA's] Mental Health and Human Services program.

All the teachers are excellent, they’re fabulous. Nobody wants you to fail, and there’s a stigma that goes on when you come to college you’ll see the movies and you see the dictator, oh you got to get an ‘A” if not I’ll fail you… whatever. So there’s this hype that goes along with it. But nobody here wants you to fail, not even one person. And they will work with you to make sure that you don’t. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen teachers, they’ll be like “Uh, make sure you get that in even though (I don’t want to give up the secrets) this was due last week.” If you got some stuff going on, family emergencies, that happens a lot. Sometimes, you know, work–things just gets crazy. They will work with you because nobody wants you to fail. Absolutely not one person–especially me!

I would tell people that the staff here at Rockland, at URock, is awesome. They’re so cool. All the ladies that work the front desk Deb Meehan, Beverly Bayer, these are people that genuinely care.

If for some reason if somebody was floundering at 18 years old they could come to a place like this and kind of get a gist of what it’s like to be around a number of different groups of people because everybody just kind of falls into their own little category at one point of time or another. But it’s a great place to get that sort of experience.

I’m hoping to get my degree so that I can work with at-risk teens and/or like incarcerated inmates, I kind of want to work with the people that society may or may not have forgotten about, and I think that there’s a lot of room, there’s a lot of improvements that can be done, I think, in that direction, and I kind of hope to get in and help, especially with at risk teens. I can really identify with at risk teens.