Introductions

Sometimes people start at the beginning.

My name is Kristina. I've just finished my 5th semester at the University of New Brunswick's Renaissance College in Fredericton, Canada. And I am soon going very far away to learn more than I can understand.

I was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. I went to school, grades 1 through 12, in the French Immersion program with people I absolutely loved. In grade 7, I joined the band, playing Trombone, and met some very talented musicians, and a number of good friends. After high school, I attended Shad Valley in Calgary, and met 50 increadibly intelligent people. In the fall of 2005, I started a program I was not sure I could finish, and after 2 days knew that the people and their wisdom would hold me in no matter what. I'm hoping all this means that the world is a place where you never stop meeting good people.

I am attending university taking a program called Renaissance College. Its a small faculty with 20 to 25 people in each class. After 3 years and two summers, we graduate with a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership, which means we have the tools to understand a huge breadth of information and ideas, and we understand how we relate to this, and how and where we can create change. To graduate, we must be deemed to have reached a level of competence, and to have grown, in RC's six learning outcomes: Effective Citizenship, Knowing Oneself and Others, Multi-Literacy, Personal Well-Being, Problem Solving, and Task-Oriented Social Interaction. To RC, this means we can be leaders. I've already said that I initially wasn't sure if i could finish the program: it was a far cry from the Science degree I had always assumed I would have, and I wasn't sure it was for me. This uncertainty about finishing holds true today, but in an opposite way: I have no idea how it could ever be over. I love what I am learning here.

Part of what makes RC unique is its focus on experiential learning: learning by doing. To live this out, RC has two internships as part of the program requirements. The first, the Canadian Internship, is working, someplace in Canada, with six aims: to develop leadership skills by leading a small project; to work with a mentor and observe leadership in action; to learn, through work experience, about career and personal interests; to develop technical and professional skills in an area of interest; to do work of value for an organization, to become involved in that organization, and to understand its role; and, finally, to learn about oneself through new experiences and situations.

The second internship is International. The summer after second year, students find volunteer placements to do work in cultures significantly different from home and often in different languages, with the aims of gaining greater understanding of the world and its variety of people, and to experience new perspectives, challenges, and the functioning of other societies. Because of this, I have friends travelling all over the world: Ecuador, Italy, Vietnam, Ghana, Slovenia, Bhutan, and the United Kingdom. Me, I'm off to Burkina Faso with a good friend of mine, Emily.