Posts tagged with intro.
About me and this blog
I'm the first person in my family to complete high school and am navigating the challenges of being a first generation student while overcoming a learning disability. After high school, I spent three years in uniform with the Canadian Forces Reserve.
For the past two and a half years, I've covered post-secondary education offering regular commentary and analysis on a wide range of issues. From early days appearing in a personal blog, this coverage continues here.
Each week, I'm going to write at least one major column on Tuesday and respond to comments in another post on Friday. I will be writing shorter posts all the time.
The Tuesday column will analyze an issue or major news story. The comments will be open and I look forward to reading your thoughts on the topic. I'll read every comment and respond in another post each Friday morning. The idea is to have an conversation about post-secondary education and for both you, the reader, and I to end the week more informed than we began.
The rest of the week, there will be regular posts about events affecting higher education and, of course, a note or two related to my pinball obsession. (I'm a member of the Toronto Ontario Pinball League. Yes, there is such a thing.)
A little more about me:
I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario living in subsidized housing complexes until my eighth year. Between ages eight to twelve, I lived many areas of the city as my mother entered an relationship with an abusive man. Identified as gifted at age nine, I was kicked out of the regular school system at age thirteen. Luckily, I was placed in foster care at age thirteen and able to reenter the regular school system at age fourteen. A few years later, I became the first in my family to complete high school.
In 1998, the suburban and inner-city public school boards in the Hamilton area were merged. I was president of my high school's computer support team. We ran the entire school network and the new board was creating policies that would dictate how we operated. I decided to join the school board committee making the policy. This was my first hands-on exposure to politics and I didn't plan for it to go further than protecting my own interests in operating the school network.
The chair of the school board asked me to join a few more committees as the student representative. I did. Two years later, I ran for public school board trustee.
After high school, I decided to take a series of full-time contracts with the Canadian Forces Reserve and spent three years in uniform before leaving to attend university.
I started at the University of Manitoba, where I spent a year on campus. During this year, I took on the university's residence food services, writing a report on campus food services across Canada as a member of the University of Manitoba Students' Union Council.
I blogged about my work and shared my thoughts as a member of UMSU Council. During this time, I began investigating university and student union practices across the country. Realizing there was no one else covering these issues online, I began to focus my blog on these issues.
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JOEY COLEMAN