About Me - Education
I wrote this entire page of text because I want to show that even if a child diagnosed with something that can make them feel anxious, compulsive, aggravated, or selfish, it is still possible to attain an education at a top university in the nation.
In the very beginning... (well, not as peaceful as my parents hoped)
My full education started in 1997, when I was at a nursery school somewhere in the south shore of Montreal. Over one year ago, I received a diagnosis for autism at the Montreal Children's Hospital; feeling desperate, my parents decided to place me in specialized education.One year later, I was transferred and enrolled at Riverside School Board's REACH School, formerly Victoria Park School, in Saint-Lambert. Back then, it was a school for students who had a diagnosis for a mental or physical disability. It is currently still standing to this day, but at a different building because the old building, and the one I was in, is now RSB's Alternate High School. It was a difficult decision my parents had made because to my own thoughts, they didn't quite understood completely the degree of my diagnosis at that time. They were anticipating that I was not going to be able to make it through primary school and reach the status I'm in right now.
Over 10 full months, I worked in collaboration with a shadow (or educator, as I preferably call it) in trying to progress my education, while at the same time having fun with my classmates. There were several activities I did to practice social integration with other students: painting with acrylic paints, colors on shaving cream in aluminum pans, going out to a couple of jungle gym outdoors with one of them consisting completely of assembled planks of wood and rubber tires in the ground, playing Kid Pix on the schools' old-style Macintosh computers, musical chairs, playchute, or any other physical activities. At that time, the school had other children who were diagnosed for an early physical or mental disability. In June 1999, we celebrated the end of preschool by holding an outdoor party with a dance act. (Because my parents were prosperous at that time, they recorded my performance in a VCR video camera.)
Childhood Activities as a Toddler
Whenever I was at home, there were so many activities I did. There was me playing computer games on this IBM Aptiva tower computer, with both Windows 95/98, whether it was playing around with the themes, some Disney games including Winnie The Pooh, and a bunch of other learning activities. There was also me watching multiple Winnie The Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine videocasettes, Thunderbirds in French, and among a few other Disney videos available to us at that time. We also had a whole bunch of books to look at, a few television shows, and a few sets set up thanks to my parents including a swinging set and a wooden house with a sand pit at the bottom.Post-pre-education, as I'd Like to Call It
During the summer of 1999, because of my delay with speech, I went in for specialized speech therapy by attending a daily summer camp at the Saint Matthias' Anglican Church in Montreal for several hours a day starting at 9:00 AM. Lots of activities were done there; memories can be bought up, but there are so many details to discuss.In September 1999, following yet another desperate conversation about where I was gonna go next in terms of my education, they decided that I was going to complete regular education. That's because they found out that I really wasn't talking enough to my classmates at REACH School, but I had the potential to succeed primary education. The assessments done on me revealed that I actually was surprisingly doing well with my educator, and thus my parents concluded that my intelligence was too high to keep on studying at REACH School. And so, I was switched over to Boucherville Elementary School.
Over the next 6 years and eight months, I went through not only different kinds of therapy, treatment and discipline from my elementary school staff, but also through specialized, accommodated ways to make sure that I was going to complete elementary school. It was a rough, and sometimes agonizing progress. There had been so many cases where I went through time outs, detentions, and different kinds of punishments or meetings because I wasn't really in control with my behavior completely. I felt like I really pushed myself on for perfectionism and egoism all because I was too afraid to live realistically with my peers and teachers.
Several things were tried out as I progressed. For example, early in my education, I was a young student with Scouts Canada. Eventually, because my behavior was still out of control and went against my parents' dreams, I resigned from the scouts. In addition, I was registered with Services de répit Emergo to attend Camp Mariste in the outskirts of Rawdon (about two hours away north from Montreal) for a summer camp. I did this three times, usually in the beginning of July, in 2002, 2003, and 2004, for 11 straight nights. Eventually, after my last summer staying in, because my worriness and dependence to my parents were still out of control, I obsessed my parents to stop sending me to summer camp altogether.
However, it was through perseverance and support that enabled me to complete elementary school. I had intervention from multiple educators and teachers; considering the degree of my disability, it was a breathtaking and stressful process for my parents because they were not feeling confident that I was going to be able to make it through elementary school. At one point, because of the stress resulted from trying to manage me and my brother, there was one situation where it ended up with my parents filing for divorce. Somehow, I found myself later, even though I've gotten more erratic and shy, to succeed in Grade 6 exams and pass elementary school.
The Next Step in my Crazy Adventures
Next stop was high school: Heritage Regional High School, to be exact. This was the school I was recommended to go at the end of elementary school, only to say no because I was feeling too aggravated about being under Riverside School Board's control. We did try to have me go to Vanguard High School in Montreal, only we made a major change to have me attend Heritage Regional instead.I started enrolling there in September 2006. To ensure my progression at high school, I had a file opened with the Student Services Department based there. Even though I did succeed in completing elementary school, there were still a whole bunch of situations my parents had to consider, where one of them was the lack of motivation to participate in several activities outlined by a few of my courses. The other was my friendship with someone where I paid too much attention to it after she decided to show up frequently and attract my attention.
Because at one point, my social approaches to that person was out of control and unrealistic, my parents decided to put me through social therapy with CRDITEDME (Centre de réadaptation en déficience intellectuelle et en troubles envahissants du développement de la Montérégie-Est), a local rehabilitation centre in Longueuil. We tried different techniques to ensure that I was going to keep myself sociable with my peers and develop friendships for skill development later on in my education. Somehow, I really was pushing myself so hard to keep my interests consistent and to try to get people's attention to follow me. That has radically changed overtime, but somehow I knew I was going to keep on asking for other people's attention in a way that conveys interest in developing friendships, and that's why I ran into moments of discouragement or sadness.
However, going back to the good side, some things has made me feel like I was the most recognized student of Heritage at the time. Thanks to the support from Student Services and both my educators and teachers, I was enrolled in the school's honour roll four times in a row for achieving term averages of at least 80%. I once participated in UWaterloo's Canadian Computing Competition, in the Pascal Contest division in February 2009. To my surprise, and to my classmates' surprises, I scored over 100 points and won the School Champion Medal and Certificate of Distinction. And based on my scores of 90% and above in Secondary 1 and 2 Math, I was placed in the enrichment group for three full years, as well as taken physics and chemistry in Secondary 5.
I volunteered in two Christmas food drives to help me with the social integration, and participated in two different variety shows in the 2010-2011 school year. My original goal of that year was to rectify a strong friendship I had before and to revise the social stigma I've experienced where my friends weren't really interested in inviting me over for a movie night, eating at a restaurant, playing sports, or just socializing at someone's house. Otherwise, for my involvement with the Black History Month Variety Show 2011, I won a $100 graduation bursary. It was a lip sync of Justin Bieber's Pray to commemmorate the lost souls of the January 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti and its capital, Port-au-Prince. Before, I did a last-minute lip sync of the original Pokémon theme in September 2010 with a bunch of other Secondary 5 students, and had intentions of singing “With A Little Help From My Friends” by The Beatles in May 2011 to remind my audience in an indirect way that I definitely want them to start socializing with me and inviting me over.
Trouble with Finishing High School but Looking to Next Step
Before graduation, it did came to my attention that I was going to do computer science at either Champlain College Saint-Lambert, or one of its Montreal counterparts, Dawson College in Westmount. Considering that I really was slow with my homework and wanted to stay constrained to interests of my own including YouTube videos, I decided to go for Champlain. And so, based on the anticipation Student Services had of my education at the time, they decided to put me through two sessions with Champlain's WINGS program one weekend, where it was a mentoring program for CEGEP education. It really wasn't that fun, though, because I still faced self-pressuring problems to video games and friendships, and wasn't really open-minded to how I was going to socialize with new people. To me, I felt like I was seeing a very blind spot, and therefore I felt really bored and sad instead of moving on and trying to work things out with everyone else; I was simply pushing myself too much and not thinking realistically.There was one more obstacle I had to face and go about sometime in the summer: I had to go to summer school to get through Secondary 5 French. I'd only wish I would had the ability to be bilingual or be able to speak multiple languages like Japanese without feeling so overwhelming or too stressed out for not being flexible enough. Somehow, from my diagnosis, we were told that I was going to have a lot of trouble. And so, I had to sacrifice nine summer days to go through morning lectures and complete two exams with the help of the summer school principal; it was done at Riverside's Centennial Regional High School in Greenfield Music. It was only through her and my attempt to follow along that made me pass the course and get my high school diploma.
Traversing through College
Anyway, I started college education in September 2011. To help me through the education process, I had a special needs advisor work in conjunction with me and my instructors. However, I was administrated into college successfully without having to worry about going through an intensive process about the degree of my disability; based on my excellence in mathematics and how I was enrolled in the enrichment program three times, I was awarded a provisional acceptance into Computer Science. (Of course at one point I could have been administered into the International Baccalaureate Program, but I think we decided not to go for it because we knew it was too much for me to take.)My first few classes were rough at the time since I wasn't still used to CEGEP. It was only through following along the lectures and understanding the logic more that made me enable to be really good in Java programming. In addition, because I was exposed to HTML twice in the past, it was very easy to understand the tags in my “Introduction to Multimedia” course.
Eventually, I gotten myself to follow along with everyone else, despite the degree of my disability.
There were quite a few interesting classes I found myself interesting as I progressed, some of them with very good teachers. One of the courses I took was Computer Hardware in Winter 2012 where I was exposed to different kinds of circuitry in a computer, mostly the motherboard and peripherals, because back then I was so interested in building a computer of my own for experience and for functionality, but never had the money nor the training for.
Another course was Ethics (or it's simply ethical approaches) in Fall 2013, where to my surprise, I thought it was going to be on different types of religion which wasn't so familiar to me at the time, but it actually wasn't. It was applying different ethical approaches to controversial situations, where one of them was the widely-known “compassionate murder” or Tracy Latimer, and the other was 3D printing of guns pioneered by Digital Defense.
However, along the way, there were quite a few struggles I've faced. One of them was extreme discouragement in trying to answer questions or be prepared for a test in my first Humanities course. The other was when I had to take on only two different French courses. My instructors for them did understood the situation, and so they decided to help me out, along with a couple of tutors (with one of them being an instructor at Champlain), to secure a passing grade as long as I kept my efforts up, which it did worked out at the end. I was safely placed in the lower two levels out of the four offered at the institution, and to my surprise, I passed both courses with at least 70%, hence I didn't ended up having to do a summer course.
There are quite so many details for me to discuss about my college education that I think the best way for me to do this, along with my past education, is to put it all in a book and sell copies of it in both printed and electronic forms.
On the afternoon of the 23rd of June, 2014, to the end of three long years of mixed feelings and perseverance, I finally attended Champlain's Class of 2014 Graduation Ceremony. Stepping onto the stage and having to succeed this far into education, ready to take on the next step, I decided to leave out a salute to the audience. Somehow, there was an amazing amount of cheer going on to my success, even with me being so nervous upon setting up to the stage.
Where I'm at Right Now
After writing all of this stuff down specifically to describe my past education, I feel that I definitely do have the potential to succeed quite well, and unpredictably, at University of Waterloo. I am living there on my own, all separated from my family, and freshly determined to keep on working and working, never giving up, to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering.Perhaps I should write a book about this whole experience in case my goals set out at University of Waterloo do work out. After all, I think every single student at UWaterloo has a story to tell. Could this be true?
I have made it this far, and I am not even finished yet. Even though I do have problems and interests of my own, I still feel that I can do much better.
Can I definitely make University of Waterloo my own home, my own place to develop pride, and my own place to exhibit awesome influences?