Well, good news this morning. After a long, dark night with no power on my street from about 10pm until 6am I got up and checked my status with EI. I’ve been accepted! Great! So I called and made an appointment with a counsellor to apply for funding to return to school. It’s next Wednesday, so keep your fingers crossed for me! I really want to get more education, and it’s looking like it might actually happen.

Now I want to take a sort of “business” action plan in with me to my appointment. If you go in with everything ready and knowing exactly what you want to do, it looks much better on you than going in all flaky and not knowing what you want to do. The idea of the program is to upgrade your skills to get better employment and therefore not need their services again. I have never used them before, and have paid a lot of money into EI over the last 12 years so I stand a very good chance of getting my schooling funded. The only problem is that it’s past the application deadline for most things I want to do. These are the programs I’m looking at:

Centennial College: Book and Magazine Publishing (1st choice, great program, fantastic reputation, however small number of applicants accepted and way past the application deadline. I sent an email to the course coordinator anyway.)

Humber College: Journalism for Print and Broadcast (Great program from a very good college that has a high recruitment rate for employers. However, it’s a 3 year program. I want a one or two year program.)

Sheridan College: Broadcast Journalism (up there with my 1st choice. Sheridan is easily one of the best colleges in Canada, but along with that it’s extremely expensive and difficult to get into. This is a 2 year program that covers a lot of things I’m interested in learning. A certificate from Sheridan looks fantastic on a resume. It’s also quite far away from where I live and would be a long commute.)

There are some others, but these are the ones I’m really interested in. Anyone who has taken any of these or who can reccommend similar programs in the Toronto area, please do leave me comments or let me know. I have been out of school for a long time, and the thought of returning is daunting as it is, let alone trying to decide if I’m making the right choices or not.