Creating A Different Ending - Part 1

I wanted to talk about school today.

In 2000 I graduated from high school.  I lived in Ontario and we had 13 grades to finish, and so I was newly turned 19 years old; I still have trouble believing that that was 12 years ago.  Throughout high school there had never been any doubt in my mind that I would go to university, I just didn't know what for.

I had been 'good' at several subjects, but great in only a few, one of them being English.  Looking back now I realize that I probably had the ability to be excellent in many more areas but my interests were never really encouraged.  My family believed that I should be a teacher, and that was that.  I was good at writing, I enjoyed reading and I was shy but funny and I had many friends; it seemed to everyone but me that teaching English was a good fit.

What stands out the most for me now about my search for a university is how haphazard it was.  All graduating students had to take aptitude tests (which all said I should be a teacher!), and talk to a guidance counsellor about our futures, but that was all I remember.  I spent lunch hours looking through the thick university catalogues in the library, making lists of every university in Canada that offered a program in English which was, well, every university in Canada, pretty much.  At the meeting with my guidance cousellor I suggested a few alternate routes, one I remember is international trade law, but I also recall a desire to do relief work, or work for the UN in some capacity.  None of these were really taken very seriously, or if they were, they were followed by an overwhelming list of everything I would have to do to get from a 19 year old graduate of high school to a professional in my field.

I found the college I ended up attending by browsing through one of those library catalogues one day.  The only thing I remember about the entry was how the author described it as a place for the 'cream of the crop' and for 'only the best'.  It offered me a challenge, and the possibility to leave my hometown and strike out on my own.  The Ontario Universities Application Centre offered three spaces on their form for choices, so I applied only to that college and to two 'safety schools'.  I was accepted to all three and despite not really having enough money to attend, took out massive student loans and went anyway.

I won't give a long, detailed account of college life here, but I will say that that first year I tried to keep my options open.  I mentioned to my parents before I left that I might want to be an archaeologist, but they were still firmly in the take-English-and-become-a-teacher camp, and so I took the pre-requisites for both programs and delayed the choice until later.  That year I became friends with a large group of English and History students and their passion for the subject swayed me.  By the beginning of second year I was determined to become an English professor.

The Summer between third and fourth year I came home to work in a small bookstore.  The full-time paycheck, combined with meeting the man who would become my husband and realizing the extent of my loans, convinced me to take a year off from school.  One year turned into two, then two into three...my friends had all graduated from college now and my boyfriend had turned into my fiancee.  My life had shifted from the college experience into something else, not quite adulthood as I imagined it, but something beyond the become-a-teacher existance I'd been living.  I still felt as though I needed to finish my degree, though.  I took a few courses at one of my hometown universities, but ultimately the big name of my first choice college was pulling me.  Despite everything, I wanted my degree to say Big Name College across the top, not Provincial Second Choice, and so we left our jobs and our futures and moved me back to school.

I spent a year and a half taking courses part time and working full time at another bookstore.  David and I agreed that I would finish a three-year general BA rather than a four-year honours, which is what I had previously been working towards.  By this point I was again uncertain about whether English was the right path for me, but since I didn't know what was, I just wanted to finish anything at all and move on with my life.

I was married in the Summer of 2008 and graduated a few months later.  It had taken me nine years to get a three year degree and become...a bookstore clerk, a job I could have taken right out of high school without any education at all.

In the past two and a half years since that walk across the convocation stage to get my fought-for degree I've thought a lot about what went wrong with my education and what I would change.

But that's part two.