Like many males his age, COD freshman Eduardo De la Torre has an interest in cars. He has a love for cars and has had a desire to be around them for a while. The only problem for De la Torre is that he had very little knowledge on cars and how they worked.

“What made me decide to take TCD in highschool was that I have always know that I wanted to work with cars for a living,” De la Torre said. “And also I didn’t [know] many things about cars. I knew the common things about them, but [I] didn’t know how to repair them.”

He decided he wanted to make this love into a career his sophomore year of high school when he signed up for a program at the Technical Center of DuPage (TCD) that is dedicated to help students get the knowledge of certain fields sooner in their high education careers. He would be able to learn more about cars and how they work and would get the hands on experience that a real mechanic would get.

Students in their junior and senior year of high school are able to enroll in the program TCD, held at COD’s Addison campus. The program connects TCD and whichever high school the student attends with the individual program that they so choose, then leads them on the path that they can continue on throughout their careers at COD.

The program helps its students when they start to attend COD by making the transition easier for them curriculum wise. The curriculum between the two parallels each other making the transition easy for those who choose to take this course than those who choose to start these courses when they start COD. COD freshman Kyle LaCount was involved in the automotive program feels that TCD helps more with the hands on learning process for the students and helps prepare students for further schooling.

“It’s a plus knowing hands on as well because you have to have a good understanding of how these things operate if you are to design them,” LaCount said. “I think it prepares you for what you should be able to undertake once you do further schooling for it. It definitely helps but you aren’t ready for the field straight out of high school.”

Many feel that programs like TCD help further their education in these fields of study based on what they learn and based on their interests as well. COD freshman Nathan Carnevale was also involved in the automotive program that TCD offered, and felt that the program helped him then and still continues to help him while attending COD and the classes that he is currently taking.

“I think it did help me because we had access to much better equipment and manuals,” Carnevale said. “A lot of what I learn at COD I already did at TCD, there’s even some of the same teachers.”

Making the decision to go into these fields so soon in their early adulthood lives would seem like a mistake to some. For De la Torre, the automotive path is one that he plans to stay on and feels that the TCD program through COD helped him stay on this path and prepare him for his future in the automotive field and continues to help him with his education here at COD.

“I am still on the same path as I was before of becoming a auto tech. What made me stay on the same path was that I really enjoyed working on cars would like to make a living out of it,” De la Torre said. “The program did help get me ready for the field because I learned the basics of how everything should work and when getting in the field it did help because I had a good idea of how things should work but everything is different in the real world.”