Catherine Holmen

“I think I would still choose to come here. You end up making your own family when you live away from family. You make friends who are as close as family. You aren’t actually related but they have that same degree of importance. I couldn’t imagine not having this school as a part of my life. I love how Vancouver feels.

“When I was working at a summer camp after grade 12 for 8-9 years. When I saw a position in that camp that interested me that was not directly with the kids. This role was more of an organizational thing. The camp was on an island, and the logistics of running a camp on an island are huge. You have to take out the garbage, make sure that there was enough food and enough propane. I think that the role was called on-site coordinator. Basically running the physicality of the place, like the boat rides to the camp. It was like I think I will be good at this. And it taught me so many things about managing lots of people with lots of information coming my way and shouldering responsibility at a fairly young age I was 23. …. It taught me how to work together in a team, diving responsibilities and learning how to lead and work on a team. These are lessons that I still use in my work today even though it isn’t the same they are in the same headspace.

“I think part of it is to try to things out. I had never been to this camp before I started working there when I was 18 but a friend of mine said “you would actually be pretty good at this you should try it. Listening to those voices that are around you that know. Because we often have blind spots about ourselves of like where we need to improve or what our strengths and weaknesses are and other people have a way of speaking to that. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen and you try it. I got a bit of flak from working on the island and people were like “when are you going to get a real job”. And I thought that you know this job might not be the highest paying job but it is still a job and the lessons that I learnt are invaluable. I suppose this is like listening to people but when they have your best intentions. Like when my friend said that I would be good working at that camp. And not listening to the negative and critical people who said to stop working that job.

“I did not have to work very hard in high school. It came very easily to me like I got really good grades without really having to manage my time very much. Like I did a lot of stuff outside of school I was doing dance lessons and I was babysitting a lot. But school was very easy and then when I got into university school was not very easy and I hadn’t learned some of those skills about structuring my time or being diligent about like getting work done so that if I don’t understand it I could do something before its due. I didn’t have to learn a lot of that stuff in high school. … I would tell myself to finish the work sooner before it gets to be too much.”