Choosing the right University
--
Did you know that there are over 25,000 Universities in the world? Choosing the right university for the right career path seems impossible and quite honestly, a stressful process.
During high school, once grade 12 started, the thing that was on everyone’s mind was to get the highest mark to get into the university of their choice. It seemed like everyone was consistently stressing, for good reason. There are lots of factors that go into choosing a university. From the residence, location, program, extracurriculars, campus opportunities, the list goes on. There was also the constant fear of not getting into any university. I applied for seven different universities and I have friends who applied for 15.
When I was looking into where I wanted to apply, I focused on two things: Location and Program.
Location: Some students want to go abroad. Some want to move out and some want to stay at home and commute. Fortunately, being in Canada, I am fortunate enough to have many great university options where it did not make sense to spend international fees. Almost everything that I could find in the United States or the UK, I could find a suitable alternative near where I was living. While I had great university options around me that I could easily commute to, one of the biggest reasons why I was excited about university was to move out of the house and start being more independent and having more freedom. I still applied for universities that were near me, but when it came to ranking, the further, the better.
Program: The question that I get asked most often by those younger than are “Which program are you in?” which is then followed up by “Why did you choose Waterloo for design?”. For context, I go to the University of Waterloo, a school that is very well known for its Engineering faculty. My second choice was Ryerson University which is more well known for its creative arts programs. I choose the University of Waterloo because the program that I was going into was broad in terms of what I was learning. I was in a program called Global Business & Digital Arts (or GBDA for short) and it taught a lot about different creative arts such as photography, videography, graphic design, UX/UI design, etc. along with business concepts. The program that I applied for at Ryerson was Media Production. As much as I…
