pilot project

my education has been an ongoing series of pilot projects over the course of seven years.

i'm not kidding.

1) brock life 

i started university at 17. my interests after high school included english/writing, environment/sustainability, and general activism. no doubt, all of these things made me decide that going into hearing sciences made the mot sense (did you catch the sarcasm? good.) hearing sciences at brock was going to end with a BA in humanities. because a "science" program was humanities. what else does brock list as programs under the faculty of humanities? classics, english, philosophy, music, drama, history, liberal arts, visual arts, canadian studies... and so on. yep. still makes perfect sense.

hearing sciences required physics, biology, and chemistry. i took biology in summer school in high school. i'm awful with numbers. of course, i struggled. i excelled at my linguistics courses but failed both physics and biology. i didn't have to take chemistry until second year of the program, if i made it that far. i could change into speech and language sciences instead (it's similar but without the "science" component), but i didn't like that idea. i didn't even like what my supposed end result was going to be for hearing sciences. so, upon the end of my first year (being at least 2 courses behind), i changed my major to a program that had just started the same year i entered university: tourism and environment.

tourism and environment (TREN) was a social science. i heard about the program from a guy i met, drunk on residence one night. he only had good things to say about it. i had the ability to choose core courses and electives, of which i made an attempt to minor in writing, but the shortage of courses in writing made that nearly impossible. TREN really caught my eye. the professors stood out and the department was small. by my fourth year in university, i had grades high enough to embark on a study abroad program to new zealand with 8 other TREN folks. we got lucky that year, as the shortage of core courses for TREN and professors to teach them were the worst they had ever been so far in the program. i gained the allotted amount of courses needed for the year while in new zealand for 3 1/2 months (which didn't come cheap.. but was well worth it).

in my fifth and final year of TREN, i wrote a research project with 3 other TREN folks which received attention on all levels. not only did we end with one of the highest grades ever given in the research course, but the praise and encouragement from our department and professors was unreal. talks about publishing in journals were underway. the TREN department offered all graduating students to give feedback on where the program needed to improve for the future. if only they had done this in the beginning or halfway through so we could have changed everything we didn't like.

i decided i was going to apply to masters programs. my research project advisor (the one who gave us the grade) kept telling me he wouldn't write me a reference letter for my application to a masters because my "grades weren't good enough." well, fuck. so, i applied to a few post-graduates at colleges that had something to do with the environment. and in september 2011, i was toronto bound.

2) seneca, round 1 

i got into a post-graduate certificate program called project management - environmental (PME). it was only in it's second or third year when i started. i was stoked because it had an internship and the majority of my classmates didn't have any work experience, like me. but, if you've been keeping up with this blog at all, you'll know how much i struggled with such an unorganized program and terrible professors. i learned some stuff but i'm still unaware of how it will benefit me in the long run. this runs true when one of the people interviewing me last year was concerned that i was trying to steal his job, being that i had the education to be a "project manager." sigh. yes, i'm gonna take your job with no work experience. THEY TOOK YER JOB!

a classmate in PME told me about the program she was in last year, called green business management (GBM). it was also a post-graduate certificate. when i looked into it, it definitely had more of a sustainability and environment focus rather than PME - which seemed to focus on... service? civil? government? law? actually, i have no idea what PME was centred around. i think that kind of sums up the entire program, right there. confused. the department offered us a chance to give feedback on the program and where to improve. and oh, we gave it.

i applied to GBM and got in right away. i hoped that i wouldn't have to return to school in september 2012 and that i'd get some job for at least the summer of 2012. that didn't happen, so back to seneca i went.

3) seneca, round 2

i hoped things would be different. they weren't. i quickly realized that it wasn't exactly the department or faculty's fault for having terrible programs; it was seneca not actually caring about their graduate students. GBM was only in it's third or fourth year when i started. again, my classmates were in the program to gain real-world work experience through the internship. and fuck, we all know how that's turning out. i'll give you a hint: it's not well. it seems as though most days after class ends, my program gets together and bitches about all the things that went wrong and things that need to change in the short and long-term. there are five weeks left in the program, and most of my classmates still sit there with a confused look on their face, wondering what it is that these professors are trying to teach.

i'll admit that there are 2-3 professors that i highly enjoy and make their classes a wonderful learning environment. and yes, they are much better than the shit i had to deal with in PME. but there are still so many things that need to be improved. when i looked online at the newly improved PME program this year, there were a few course changes. but when talking to current PME students, it seems that most of them are still facing similar challenges as my year did.

7 years of post-secondary education. 3 different programs running as supposed pilot projects. i finish GBM in 5 weeks. i'm tired of school and i'm tired of offering feedback on how things would be better.

somebody hire me so i can get out of this school bubble and start the real world. 

post graduate program review

i learned a lot of really neat things over the past 8 months.

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.

so what did we do? well, we created the checklist and methodology. essentially, a 40 page project. it included the actual project plus various project management tools and techniques that we used. also, there were 3 people in my group, and the one guy basically did next to nothing the entire semester. my mentor was a bit of a dick and rarely helpful -- because we didn't really need him for much, but he was always extremely nosy and into our business which didn't help a lot of things. after that already 8 hour day before seeing him, and staying close to another 3 hours with him once a week for no reason, i just couldn't take him any more. it's a good thing i know how to be a dick back.. i can thank my thesis advisor for that.

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!

i like to think of us as community.. kinda.

4. recommendations

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!