Southeast Community College - Lincoln

hump it,
put a santa claus,
on pete hood,...

 

Sorry for not getting back sooner. The calibre of teaching at SCC, from what I hear, is excellent. I drove a taxi here in Lincoln, and I made it a point to ask all the truckers what they had heard about it. Some people from quite distant parts of the country had heard good things about it. I visited their professors one day, and we spoke for an hour and a half or so.

They showed me their classrooms and 'book-learning' materials. We took a drive around the shifting track. It's about 3/4 miles long with inclines, downgrades, sharp turns, and tight stretches.

In the center part of the track, they have makeshift areas to practice parking and backing in alleys. They also practice parallel parking, backing in a serpentine fashion, and all that stuff that requires a good eye for close approximations.

They are a bunch of affable guys. I felt really comfortable with them and their 'sales pitch' of the program. They're also third-party examiners, so they said they'd be the people giving you the CDL test and your license eventually. (I believe that's right.)

As keelady mentioned about Crete, their company is very highly regarded. I also asked every Tom, Dick, and Harry in my cab what they knew of them. Nobody had a problem with them. They start at $0.41/mile and go up by $0.01/mile for the next six years to max out at $0.47/mile thereafter. They have a 401(k) and also hire O/Os quite regularly. That's what the recruiter told me there. All of the salary stats are on their website.

The sticking point is that I heard that you have to score over a 94% in class (or on your CDL) to be hired by them right out of school. As has been mentioned, though, the school is good. Crete told me they do a lot of hiring from SCC. They told me that one can apply to them as a driver before you start school and, depending how you do in school, they'll immediately take you out of school. I forget if they said you need your haz-mat endorsement right away. I would think so.

Everything about running legal and making sure you're ready to go, on Crete's behalf as keelady had said, is spot on what I've heard, too. They sound like the choice place to go if you have the chance.

 

I liked driving a cab. A good number of the people made you wonder about how prevelant drug use really is in Lincoln. I was let go for two minor (extremely minor) accidents, but I was already wondering about the cars and the winter driving here. The head mechanic is awesome, but the owners go to police auctions and the like to pick up cars for $500. When they get to us, the cars already have anywhere between 200,000-300,000 miles on them. They ran fine, but I always had the feeling they were right on the edge. Some were downright old and inhospitable. So I had thought of giving my notice anyway come this time of year. And that would have been hard because I really liked the job. Maybe I would have tried to stretch it and had more serious things of which to take care. The weather is rather good right now, but that doesn't mean it can't change viciously. This is Nebraska.

As for the owners, one is a former trucker that made me start thinking of this as a profession. Compound that with a road trip I took last year and that is why I'm now thinking of being a driver. When I went to SCC, the profs told me I shouldn't worry about my 'problems': one was on private property and in the other I wasn't ticketed. I just know now not to lend my attention anywhere else, no matter how little. For anything.

Like in trucking, you have to route your runs and travel quickly. It's all commission you earn. The only economic disadvantage is the number of riders. Almost 50-60 percent of them are on state-provided taxicab vouchers. That's super expensive fro the state, and I can see the vouchers getting cut. I haven't seen many cabs out for a while. They've had a ad in the paper for what seems like months. It wasn't like that when I drove. Ridership must be down, and drivers must be leaving. Not counting the ever-dwindling tips you get, you average about $8-$10/hour on an average day. I've had days, though, where I only pull in $5/hour. you can't make much more than $15/hour unless you're going to speed rather severely and take a 'scenic detour' every once and a while.

With the traffic that you see in the cab and that you see in freight as a trucker both have to be tight when the economy is tight. It wasn't so bad in the cab with the government vouchers, but you have my doubts about that already. That's why I personally wonder about trucking. Somebody here said once that if it was bought it was shipped there and most likely by truck. Hence, job security, if you can keep your nose clean, is appealing.

The country is becoming ever more materialistic. We'll buy-buy-buy for as long as we can, so we'll always need trucks. That will raise drivers' wages hopefully, and I can sock some away while I can. And pay off my educational debt. I love the fact I sit four classes and six exams away from having my MA, and I am perfectly unemployable. Big business just wants me because I'm fluent in Spanish (I was working for my MA in Spanish) and know smatterings of three other languages apart from English. I want to DO something, not sit in an office. Just like Biff Loman (Death of a Salesman). I can buy some more gear and go camping in the wilderness. (Like Moses. Haha.) They might take me in the military, so I can go learn Arabic. As part of my studies, you have to learn some of the ways Arabic has linguistically influenced Spanish. So I'm in like Flynn if I want to go to the Middle East. You already know how 'appealing' that is.

So there it is. I sort of circumlocuted (wandered) my way through the topic. All in all, I feel real good about going for it here in Lincoln. It seems to have the support needed in the populace. Also, there was was a principal for whom I taught in CA who said Lincoln was always in the center of what he did as a trucker (before he went back to school). I feel really good. I just have two lingering doubts, about which I explained here already.

 

Resurrecting a really old thread but I went to this school in the summer of 2018. I sold all my things in California, drove there and lived in my car for the two months I was going to school there. I paid around $1500 for the schooling. Really great training. The instructors, Mike and Nicole were awesome. You get plenty of time behind the steering wheel and also in the class training. They have several trucks and all manuals except one. The trucks range from old to new and they get the job done. I initially wanted to get on with Crete as they hire directly from that school and they are headquartered a few miles down from the School.

I was making $34k while I was living in California at a dead end job. Thanks to the training I got at that school, I now make $80k+ a year.