This is Me - Off to College

I said I'd hoped it wouldn't be another two years before I did the next installment. Well, two years are long gone; it's been four years since I wrote This is Me - School Days.

This week I was reading an article about a man who had a DNA test done and found out that a longtime friend was actually a distant cousin. He wrote that often we wait and don't ask our older family members about their lives and then that history is lost. And that got me thinking again about writing my story.

I am the oldest of six children, while my father only went to Grade 8, my mother went to Teacher's College, and they always told us if we wanted to continue our education, they would find a way. Being their first child, my parents had bought an education policy for me, kind of like a Registered Education Savings Plan but not government sponsored. I also only graduated high school with a junior matriculation rather than a senior matriculation, so the military paid for my first year of university. There still wasn't a lot of money so to save on boarding costs, I went to live with my mother's parents. I only applied to Dalhousie University in Halifax where they lived mainly for that reason and because it had a good medical school and undergraduate science programs.  

Yes, like many people I thought I wanted to be a doctor. The first year, that wasn't a big deal as everyone had to take a very general course load. My high school teachers had told us that university was harder than high school, so I wasn't at all surprised that my marks dropped. I still got all B and C's except in my calculus class. I did fine first term but it seemed like I missed a semester over the Christmas holidays, and I was lost. Luckily, they were two half credit courses, so I got a half credit of calculus and failed the second half. The same thing happened in Linear Algebra, I got an A+ in the first half credit and was totally lost in the second course. But I had my math credit for my degree.

At the end of my first year, I went home, to a new home. My Dad had been posted from St Margaret's to Chatham, bases which were only about 17 km apart. When I left for university, they were still living in St Mag's but moved to a married quarter in Chatham shortly after I left. My first time seeing the new place was at Christmas. It worked out well for me that we had moved to Chatham as I could apply to be a lifeguard at the town pool. I got hired and that became my summer job during university. 

We had to return to Halifax a little earlier than expected as my grandfather passed away from pancreatic cancer. My second year, I took a number of biology credits, still leaning towards pre-med. Organic Chemistry and Molecular Biology did me in. At the end of my second year, I was only a half credit over having a failed year.  What it meant though was that I would need to do a fourth year to get all the credits I needed to graduate and med school was out of the picture. 

Third year, with the classes that I selected, I only had classes on Tuesday and Thursday during the first term. They were long days, I left for university probably around 8am and my labs ran from 7 to 10pm. But it gave me three days off a week for assignments, doing readings and working. I basically walked into the swim director's office at the YMCA and walked out with a job. Most lifeguards and swim instructors are students, and it was hard to find people who could work during the day. 

Early in my third year, my mother called one evening and said she was coming up to do some Christmas shopping, when she arrived, she asked my cousins and me if we had noticed anything about my grandmother.  One of the neighbours had called and told my Mum that my grandmother wasn't well. My grandmother was diagnosed with presenile dementia, the effects were like Alzheimer's, but the doctors said it came on too fast. Before I left to go home that summer, my grandmother had been moved to a nursing home and like my grandfather, she passed around the time I was to start my fourth year. My mother, her brothers and sisters decided they would keep the house in Halifax for a year to allow those of us living there to finish school or make other plans. At the time my grandmother passed, there were two of my cousins, my mother's youngest brother and sister and myself living at the house. 

I had a pretty easy fourth year academically as I just had a few credit requirements to complete. I took some geology courses that I quite enjoyed and some environmental science and ecology credits. I attended job fairs but there wasn't much out there for a just Bachelor of Science degree; most labs wanted either technologist's diplomas or Masters degrees. After I graduated, I went to the Canadian Forces recruiting office in Halifax; they were happy to accept me but told me I would have better luck getting in if I went to the recruiting office in Moncton, NB.

I enjoyed university; the one disappointing thing and it gets me every time I see a Kindergarten graduation, is that I didn't get to wear a mortarboard and flip the tassel at graduation. At Dalhousie, you are capped, they place the cap on the head of the graduate; only postgraduates wear the mortarboard.   A little thing but it bugs me to this day. 

Yes, at the beginning of my fourth year, my family had moved again. My father wasn't posted but his release from the Forces was coming up so he took his move to his IPR (Intended Place of Residence) a year early so that my two youngest sisters wouldn't have just a single year in a new high school. So, in Moncton, I went into the recruiting office and did all the enrollment testing to join the Forces as a Direct Entry Officer. I also went to the YMCA in Moncton to apply for a job, I wasn't as lucky there as I had been in Halifax. This was around the end of May or early June of 1980, gawd that sounds like such a long time ago.  I didn't have much luck finding work with my degree but knew I was already accepted into the Forces. In late Nov, I got the message from the recruiting office that I was to report for basic officer training in Jan 1981, I was enrolled in the Forces on 6 Dec 1980, but that's a story for another day.

I promise it won't be four years before the next installment of This is Me.