The NAIT Nugget hasn’t lost me quite yet! I have returned for another short stint as Issues Editor with our editorial staff to grow the Nugget team this year. Yet it’s quite strange coming back after assuming I had written my last editorial in April.
This year will be especially confusing for many students returning to NAIT, with so many changes on campus over the summer. It will still take some getting used to, which brings me to this week’s topic – adapting to change.
As students, we’ve already had to deal with a lot of change; completing high school, finding our first job, start-ing post-secondary, maybe even moving away from home for the first time. We all face a different degree of change as well – some students move away from their home province and even home country. These changes can be hard to deal with, especially as many of them involve us leaving behind something extremely valuable – our support networks. Attending post-secondary, for some of us, is likely to be the only time in our lives that we face such a massive upheaval in our personal lives. We leave behind our family, friends, often many things we take for granted, in this transition to adulthood. We go from relatively carefree days of youth, where we only have to worry about homework, summer plans and who has a crush on whom, to being ultimately responsible for every minute of the day and facing responsibilities that frankly, we haven’t always been properly prepared for.
This is all – if we’re lucky!
Many of our classmates haven’t had the idyllic childhoods we all wish for as Canadians. For them, the transition to post-secondary can be even harder and, although they can access services at NAIT to ease this transition just like every other student, it doesn’t make the transition any easier. It’s almost impossible to address every challenge through service provision and every student faces his or her own unique challenges.
So this September, new students may have the advantage over returning students when it comes to these major changes at NAIT; after all, they’re learning everything as new, while returning students have to break habits engrained from their hours upon hours (upon hours) spent on campus from the last academic term. Yet they are almost guaranteed to be facing some even greater challenges.
This is where the NAIT community comes in. Whether you are a returning student feeling a little lost or a new student taking the first step in a NAIT career, get involved on campus. Meet your fellow students and help them out – even if it’s just to have a conversation buddy. Become the new NAIT support network and you’ll make some friends for life while you’re studying at NAIT. After all, that’s part of the whole post-secondary experience!
Nicolas Brown, Issues Editor
