About Me

Call me Susan. I am a forth year student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford Ontario. I pay for school all on my own, or, with the help of OSAP, the Ontario Student Assistance Program, and they don't make it easy to be a student in Ontario. Previous blog post not withstanding, this blog is going to deal heavily with the struggles of being a student through the lense of someone living the experience.
Information sites about college life are wholly incapable of telling someone what the studnet experience is going to be like. While major banks such as TD Canada Trust may supply information on how to budget and OSAP's site may give you the tools to apply for loans, no one can ever fully prepare you for the terror of having tuition overdue, your rent coming out, and your Visa maxed out when all of a sudden your computer decides it would like to crash. But I can surely try to tell you what it is like and also, how to survive without having to skip meals to make ends meet.
This blog will be an attempt, based largely off of my own annecdotal experiences, to tell anyone who would care to listen about the difficulty of real student life. How does it feel when your roommate's family gives them everything? Why don't your friends understand when you say that you can't go out to the bar, even if it is dollar beer night? But more then these questions, I will also be taking the time to look at why student life should cost so much. I pay thousands of dollars every year for an education that should one day help me to get a job, but for now I am swimming in debt thanks to what I believe to be a largely unreliable system of lending.
Case and point: when I applied for OSAP funding this year I was told that my parents make too much money for me to qualify. When I applied for a bank loan, I was told that my parents made too little. I have been working extra hours at work to compensate for this lack of funding while I wait for an application to reasses my loan with OSAP to be processed, but the more I work while I wait for funding, the less they will be willing to give me. Have I mentioned that I still have to pay the cable bill?
This is a blog about hard work, and struggle. Hopfully in the end it will also be about sucess. I will be writing about the problems students face as well as the solutions that are out there for them. Welcome to my life, I hope you enjoy your stay.