What colleges have you attended?

In all honesty I don’t really like this question very much. It seems like to answer this question I would be giving away information that might give a way where I am, and I don’t want to do that. But I can and want to give a little bit of information about the two colleges I have attended.

So depending on where you are in the world, you might use the word college differently to how I do. College where I am from, refers to a school you attend between the ages of 16-18 at least, but potentially up to 25 depending on exactly what you study. While in College the intent is to gain qualifications which will enable you to go on to work, apprenticeships or further education.

For me specifically I attended college so I could get the required qualifications to go to university. I think university is what some refer to as college. I spent the 4 years after college at university, and I’m going to avoid mentioning what I’m doing with all that now, but back to college.

I attended two colleges, as I had to repeat a year, and the first college I was at wouldn’t allow me to do this. The first college I attended was reportedly one of the greatest colleges in the area. But from experience, they only cared if you were exceptionally clever or were going to fail whatever course you were doing. I was neither of these things.

While at this college, I found myself continually discriminated against by one particular teacher who was surprised not to find me on the life skills course, as this was the course they believed most of the disabled students in the college took. They looked at me, saw my disability, and used that to assume my academic intellect. Anyway while there I had to have an operation and as a result of this I fIled my second year in that college. One of the teachers didn’t believe that I was in hospital, and refused to send me work as she was instructed, she ended up getting in trouble as a result. I don’t think this was the reason I failed, but I don’t think it helped.

Anyway, I still needed the qualifications in ordered to get into university, so I had to go to another college. Now this college was a lot less favoured, it was generally believed to be the college that people went to if they didn’t get into the better colleges. They provided a much broader range of subjects to gain qualifications in, and covered a lot more of the more practical subjects. But the support they provided was so much better than the reportedly better college I had attends previously. So much so the I wished I had only gone to that college and not the ‘better one’.

So I guess the moral of this story is, just because a place has a great public opinion, doesn’t mean it’s the best place for you.