Question of the day.

Say you were in high school again and you had excellent grades, test scores, etc. and were guaranteed a full ride at whatever university/college you applied to, what are five schools (more if you want) you’d want to attend?

My answer:

A veery difficult question for me. I have lots of passions as everyone of you know, but not all are as big that I would like to study them and work with them, or even if I’d like to, it may not be possible for other reasons, like because of my disability/other issues, or because it’s simply too niche, or because there aren’t any universities that teach it in my area. Given that I’ve spent most of my life hundreds of kilometres from home and not much good has come out of it looking at it overall, as well as thinking about my social and mobility difficulties, there aren’t much choices left, no matter whether I were the best or the worst in high school. Also, if I apply to this uni and were guaranteed a full ride at there, would it also mean that they would adapt to me and my issues, like the resources or lectures? Or would I have to fight for this through the whole education process on my own or just keep quiet and be glad that I can study there? If I chose an online university/college, would it also count for them?

That all being said, I don’t think I am able to choose five universities.

The one I would like to attend and still hope I willl be able to next year is University of Wales Trinity Saint David where you can study Celtic Studies online. I’ve heard about it years ago and the studies seem to suit me very well. I only hope they will be so nice to send me resources by email – you can either use them online in their learning environment or something like this, which is created in Moodle, or they can send you the resources in mail. I’ve heard a lot of negative feedback about Moodle and that it doesn’t work the best with screenreaders so I’d be really happy if they agreed to adjust it for me and send the resources for me via email, I can’t imagine my Mum reading them for me in English, or Welsh. 😀

Another one I can thnk of is our local Gdańsk University which is technically adjusted pretty well to the disabled students and is not very far away, so ultimately I could think about going there and studying Scandinavian Studies, but because what fascinates me about Scandinavian studies is the Swedish language, which I already can speak, I don’t think I’d be really glad with that decision. I actually thought about going there and studying these studies when I was more optimistic and idealistic about my future but my Swedish teacher just laughed at me and told me it’d be a waste of time in my case in his opinion, because by the time I’ll go to uni I’ll speak fluent Swedish and they won’t teach me much more of the language, the rest of the subjects would be completely irrelevant for me. After looking it through I agreed with him. After all he studied there too and was a lecturer for a while. SO if I’d go there, it would be just to get any further education and just do whatever, not because I really need it or want it, but because you should study something. And I know i’d be very frustrated, plus I don’t think I’m in the right place emotionally to do it. My Swedish still isn’t fluent, but it is very good and I can communicate, so knowing that they don’t go very in-depth in the language, I don’t think it would become better there. And even if I won’t be able to make any professional use of my Swedish, I definitely don’t want it to stop at this stage I’m now, I want to progress with it and I just feel I’d do better with it doing it my, a bit out of the box way, than memorising ready-made formulas and patterns, doing grammar exercises or having language tests every month.

And that would be all I could think about right now, that is in my rich and something I would like and could do.

What would you choose? 🙂