although i won't go into ridiculous detail about everything that happened within the project management - environmental program, here are some of the highlights (expect some major use of cognitive dissonance!):
1. good professor, bad professor
yes, i sure had a wide variety of instructors. one of them in particular that everyone in the program seemed to have a problem with. he had a tendency to not give any feedback, got angry when people came in late, wouldn't always give a break during class, wouldn't allow you to leave the class when you had to pee, argued with students over more/less grades, got angry if he taught something to us once/seven times and we still didn't understand, didn't see a problem when he handed back the midterms and then was approached by 95% of the class about grades, yelled at students... and the list goes on. he taught two of my classes. that was not fun.
a second professor had a very weird way of grading that was most of the time, extremely unfair. he wanted a ridiculous amount of information in order to be given full marks for each question. his first few tests/quizzes were like this, and once he discovered that only one person in the program had any knowledge on the subject and we had collectively decided that his grading was not good, he changed his marking scheme and made it slightly better for us. until the final exam, worth too much of our grade, which basically screwed everyone over. but i thought it was legit... i studied and memorized a lot of what was on it. i just sort of feel bad for the rest of my program during that exam.
a third professor started off alright and then i stopped going to class. this class had a very small number of people in it and rarely did i ever get any work done. the first assignment i submitted sometime at the end of january was returned to me in march; i had done the whole thing wrong. so i asked to resubmit the assignment and she agreed. then, i didn't hand it any of the other assignments, minus one that i did hand in. when it got to the end of the semester and the final assignment, i did each section of the final assignment and asked if i could still submit the other assignments i didn't do. she agreed but seemed extremely disappointed in me for not doing the work on time. she also yelled at me for not getting the work done on time like almost everyone else. honestly, i just didn't give a flying fuck about this elective course. i spent four days at the end of the semester trying to crunch out those assignments and email them in; she must have accepted them and i must have done a very good job on them despite the "late penalty" i was going to get, as i still somehow got out of that class with an A. the rest of my instructors were fantastic, except for my mentor for the internship.
2. the "internship"
i started this program based solely on the internship component. i have limited experience (see: none) in my field of study, besides shitty summers on clifton hill with tourism and i'd rather be on the environment side of things. what i, and most of the people in my program who were having the exact same problem, were hoping was that the we would gain some valuable experience and skills from this internship.
now, when i think of an internship, i think of literally being in a workplace setting with other people who work there and y'know... doing work. like, hell, if i was just the intern who took notes at a meeting or was in charge of getting coffee or making photocopies or just.. anything in the workplace that needed to be done (hell, i would have cleaned bathrooms if it meant i'd be doing SOMETHING). but this was not the case.
instead, i met with my project sponsor once. the first time, i was sick and wasn't able to meet him. he gave us a project -- to develop an environmental audit checklist and methodology to measure the effectiveness of their environmental performance. cool? i figured maybe as part of the project, we would have to conduct the audit ourselves. wrong. maybe we would have to go in and actually survey employees for our checklist questions. wrong. at the very least, i thought we would be in constant communication with the sponsor and maybe have a few days where we would be on-site, checking things out and gaining that real world experience. nope, wrong again.
3. program friends
despite all odds, the people i met in my program were amazing and i'm glad we all got through it together. these are definitely some people i won't soon forget. and i hope we can hang out and do things all summer -- and that my next year program of green business management will have just as great people. i made some life-long friendships and i'm happy for that!
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| i like to think of us as community.. kinda. |
i'm pretty sure we were the dawning age of this program. it's only been around 2 or 3 years and yet, supposedly, we have changed it so much. we were supposed to have that one awful professor for a course in the second semester. after we (see: the entire program) took the course coordinator aside and bitched about the professor to the coordinator, he made some changes and hired a wonderful professor to teach us the course in the second semester.
they'll be making changes to the curriculum for next year and not allowing an elective course. i found the elective for us to choose the most frustrating as almost nothing that interested me (or others) was available. about ten students chose a project scheduling class at a different campus in the evening. that class didn't interest me and i wasn't sure how to get to the other campus, nor did i want to have a day that started at 8am and ended at 10pm, so i didn't take it. originally, i started off the semester in an energy course that i went to 3 classes and immediately dropped for a different class -- with the third 'bad' professor. but the elective sort of tore the group apart; some were in the scheduling class, others took online or correspondence courses, some took other random classes. it was just extremely screwed up. our family was not as close as it should have been in the second semester as much as we were in the first semester when we had a fantastic schedule and no 14 hour days.
but, it's over. i graduate and get handed my ontario graduate certificate at the end of june. i would probably recommend this program more with the better curriculum -- and if the internship ever turned into an actual internship. it was a somewhat okay way to utilize the project management skills we gained from the first semester and the risk management skills in the second semester. however, the program and the courses need better organization and a focus with each class relating to each other through projects, assignments, presentations, and lectures. connectivity between courses is key to higher education and learning, and i at least felt that tourism and environment at brock had that down a lot of the time.
onto bigger things in september: green business management. because i've yet to land a job so i may as well dive deeper into my student debt!
