Before you start reading this blog post I want to clarify that studying in college and in a University in Canada are two different things: College tend to be more directly career-oriented than universities. This means they offer practical or hands-on training. Generally, a certificate program is 1 year or less, and a diploma program is 2 or 3 years. On the other hand, universities in Canada are defined as degree-granting institutions that provide bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees which could take you from 3 to 5 years or even more in majors such as medicine and law. They also focus mainly on analytical skills (the ability to understand and use information).

How was my start?

I’ll talk about my two first semester which I did almost immediately. I started my studies in September 2017. I would like to explain to you in case you are not familiar with how college in Canada works. You have one week vacation (which in my college is called reading week) every 7 weeks of class and between semester you have 2-3 weeks vacation. Most people have vacation from the end of May to the beginning of September unless, like me, you do the summer semester to graduate before (my 3 years program lasted 2 doing two summer semesters).

The first two semesters I had a common plan with every business majors (accounting, HR, project management among others). The classes were interesting but since I had only one marketing class per semester, I did like that but I wasn’t passionate about college yet.

Thankfully I had great professors and I could meet people pursuing different careers that in a group/teamwork came in handy because they put different inputs from a different perspective than mine which was marketing perspective, and that was great, I learn a lot from them.

The reason why they do this common plan is that like a friend of mine that started in the project management liked very much the marketing classes, he switched to marketing without losing any credits. Not everyone starts college as decided as I was, some people take the general business course and then decide which specialization to take.

How is college?

On my third and four semesters, I realized that college is the total opposite of what I’d experience in my year studying advertising in a University back home, it was way more practical and not that much theoretical. I had to do campaigns every week, with made-up product given by the professors, but we didn’t have that much time for feedback and for thinking about what we did wrong because we needed to focus on the next campaign. In college, professors walk you through the whole process and when you need to do a campaign is for a real client so the professors help you to deliberate the best marketing plan and campaign possible, which is cool, but I had to reformat my way of learning from figure it out yourself to listen, apply, revised and then deliberate.

They also give us way more time than a week to do a full campaign, one of the campaigns that we did, took us the full semester while learning the concepts, and applying them to our marketing plan and obviously, getting tested in midterms and other subjects from different courses.

I must say that the whole system is built so you have enough time to do things, I recommend not to take more than 7 courses (6 ideally) and go to every class because some of them have participation marks, which is basically a freebie, you just need to go, sit and listen. If you don’t leave everything to the last hour, you’ll have a lot of time to do finish assignments and study for the tests, but we all make mistakes, the important thing is that we have to learn from them. I remember that in the second half of my fourth semester I left everything for the last minute and the two last weeks was a living hell, I had to meet with 3 different groups, do 2 more assignments and study for 3 more tests. I don’t know how did I pass every subject but I finish the semester destroyed mentally. It didn’t help that the professors went on strike that year, so we didn’t have classes for a little bit more than a month, and we had to compress everything and having a shorter semester.

Overall the experience has been very good, I learn a lot and on my time, not in a hasty manner like it is back home. If you go to class, pick your group members and set deadlines so you don’t leave everything to the last minute, you’ll be fine.

Challenges

Some of the challenges that I faced were obviously related to language, my brain got tired faster than usual after every class because I had to put an effort to understand both the language and new concepts in English which as you already know is a foreign language to me and try to learn every topic for every class. But where I got the biggest issue were when trying to understand my peers. I learn English from classes and books, but English as every language evolves and words are being created every day, some of them are official some of them are not, but they are all being used. The other issue when communicating with my peers were that some of them speak in a low voice which was hard to understand and if you add to that someone that speaks very fast and with no articulation in their speech it made the perfect storm to me, I even had to ask them politely to speak louder or slower.

Commuting was a momentary challenge, I have to commute 40 min from my house to the college, for some of you would think that that’s nothing but I lived one block away from my high school and even in university back home I was 20 min away from my apartment. Nowadays, 40 min is nothing to me, I even created a playlist to listen on the subway and now I even like the commuting, except when the subway is crowded, but we all hate that right?.

My own inexperience was also a challenge, I had to do everything by myself, study, manage the money that my parents give me without overspending, cook (except when my sister is around 😁) and know how to prioritize things when to study, what to study. That took me a while but I kind of get it now, since I pick my classes and schedule and I know the city very well now, I know the best places to eat near the college and how to save money, I got the hang of it after earning some experience.

If you’ve read my story so far you’d realized that my family and friends mean everything to me and being far from them is not an easy thing. I’ve missed birthdays, anniversaries, good times and bad times. The latter one is the worst, not long ago my maternal grandfather died, I still remember that called, my dad told me the news, my mum was in the states, thankfully my sister was with me, so we could support each other, I felt like something died inside me. We are lucky enough that we could book a flight for the next day and get to the funeral and to see my family, most people don’t have that luck. I felt weird when I came back to Toronto, part of me wanted to stay in Chile and be with my family, but life happened and I had to come back to do the final exams from my 4th semester, I’m currently in the 5th so you can see that that wasn’t that long ago.

Where I am now?

While I’m writing you, I’m literally on my break from studying for my two last exams from this semester, but I hope to be sleeping peacefully or hanging out with friends until the next semester, it has been a tough semester, but a fun one at the same time.

What do I hope for the future?

For the near future, I’ll have a couple of weeks to relax before my last semester of college, I plan to use these weeks to find a part-time job and write some blog posts for the future. Thankfully I’ll only have 3 courses next semester, so I’ll have plenty of time to do things, like improving my writing and to think about what I really want to write about.

Thinking a little bit further in the future, I’ll go back home for 4 months in December. I hope with my diploma in hand, so I can spend time with my family to recharge batteries and come back to Toronto with a work permit and ready to join the Canadian labour force and be a contribution to this country. Many changes are knocking on my door, they are not that far and I’m very anxious to see them.

Now that I fully introduce myself to each person reading my blog, I will be writing, in parallel, about 2 important topics, of my daily life.

One will be the continuation of my studies and my last semester at the College and what will be the end result.

The other topic will be according to issues regarding my life living in Toronto, and other subjects of my interest.

I’ll need to work harder to create relevant content for you and me as a personal goal, the fun part starts now. Have a great weekend and I hope you have enjoyed my story until now, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Write to you next week, I hope you like what’s coming next 😁.

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