CLE – Callum's Blog

For my career interview, I was lucky enough to have the pleasure to interview Adrienne Cossom. Adrienne is a counsellor/social worker, and she provided me not only with information on counselling but also the career world in general. While it might seem obvious, one point Adrienne made that really stuck with me is that the first thing you should consider when choosing a career is yourself – your personal interests, needs, strengths, and weaknesses. While it might seem obvious, there is a lot of pressure to try to go for a career that makes the most money, or that people would find respectable. It’s true that the amount of money you can make is a huge aspect of choosing a career, but what’s the point in substantial amounts of wealth if you aren’t happy? You want to choose a job that interests you, and something that doesn’t stress you out too much. Additionally, the flexibility you have within your career is another huge factor. My second key takeaway is most jobs have many lessons that only come with on-the-job training. No matter how much you study and prep, you’re definitely not going to learn everything in school. For example, Adrienne recalled that at the beginning of her career, she was quite self-conscious about the outcomes of her counselling sessions (how a patient’s mood is at the end of the session). Through experience in her career, Adrienne learned that the success of the outcomes came not from experience but from the connection between her and her patient. Finally, you don’t really need to have a clear, straight path from high school graduation to your career. In fact, the career you end up with is likely going to be very different from what you were aiming for at the end of Grade 12. In Adrienne’s case, she has an undergrad degree in political science and Japanese, and she didn’t really take any courses relating to social work at all. For the first two years of university, she mainly just took what interested her: astronomy, theatre, political science, and a few art courses. Therefore, it’s not a big deal if you don’t have a clear plan of what you want to do.

I think that everyone can agree that it’s been an interesting school year! When I walked into Gleneagle Secondary for the first time in the Fall, I certainly didn’t expect that I would only be spending half of the year at school. Whether we liked it or not, we were forced to adapt to a learning environment without teachers, classrooms, or even our friends. And well at the beginning of online school, it kind of fun to be able to learn in my pajamas, it wasn’t long before I was missing the way school used to be without the restrictions that came with a global pandemic. I generally found it harder to stay motivated without physically going to school, and the time management skills I’d built at the beginning of the year were slowly slipping away. Sure, school could be stressful and loud, but when we all went to school there was a strict, consistent routine that we had to follow, and friends and teachers that helped us keep motivated along the way. As much as I tried to replicate a regular school days’ routine when online learning first started, I eventually ended up letting go and just feeling down and unmotivated most of the time. However, it was nice to be able to do homework in my bed and have a quieter environment to learn in. Throughout online learning, I found that technology often impeded my ability to be more active outside, as during school I had the option of going outside during lunch break, but at home I was constantly staring at a screen and at the end of the day I was still doing all of my homework on my laptop, with online learning limiting the mediums that I could work with (physical artwork was less convenient to submit than digital work). Therefore, my Creative Thinking Core Competency helped me transition into online learning, since I had to think outside of the box to create memorable pieces of work despite restrictions. For example, one of my assignments for English was to create a mind map. Instead of just using some kind of digital program to complete the assignment, I decided to create my mind map on paper and then scan it onto my computer. That way, I was more able to creatively express myself. Finally, I feel like my Critical Thinking was improved the most through online learning because despite feeling less motivated I still had to maintain some of my work ethic. To do this, I kept an online To-Do list to keep track of my deadlines.

The mind map I completed for English.

An example of the To-Do list I’ve been using to keep track of my deadlines.

Category Archives: CLE

CLE Job Interview

DL Remote Learning Reflection