Dwaine Plaza - Journey to College
From Natalia Fernandez
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Well let's see Karl, things got tough…I think I always harken back to, and then again this is going to sound kind of strange, to my ancestors. So, I never had anybody in my family who actually went on to do college before me. I only had a sister who was one year ahead of me so she didn't finish yet, she was still in the process. So, for me, I harken back to thinking about my immigrant family, because we had just migrated to Canada, and I watched my parents, my parents worked really hard and so that became for me, a motivation. That said, “Hey, these two people are making a huge sacrifice for you, you know, in all kinds of different ways to put you through school” – and so that became for me the push to be successful at school or to be successful in whatever I was doing. And you know, just sort of the idea that people who had come even before them were really instrumental in getting us, my grandparents, their ancestors, and so forth and so on. So it's not as if I'm doing this alone, I'm doing this with a whole bunch of people in a sense - I'm standing on their shoulders. Is what I'm getting at, I'm not doing this you know…Student: It's a support system. Dwaine: That's right. They've all been there, because of what they did, it's where I am today. Oh yeah. Okay, so when I first got to college I was a very good historian, meaning in high school, and a very good geographer. When I say "very good" I meant those were the courses I liked. If we had readings to do in history, I would read the whole book. I would go, you now have something they call Wikipedia, we actually had encyclopedias. Student: Oh, the big books. Dwaine: They're actually a book, yeah. I would pull it off the shelf and you'd actually look for the definition or whatever it is. I used to love reading those. I used to love just going to the library for instance, the public library, and sitting there and actually just pulling off books and start learning. So that curiosity, in my mind, meant that I was going to possibly try out this history thing when I went to the university. And I did; I took American History and I also took World Geography when I first got to the university. Both courses were courses that had huge numbers of students. So I had like 200 students in each class. And it just wasn't the same, in other words, I got there and thought it would be a certain thing and it wasn't that at all. And so for me, within a year of doing that I then said to myself, “Well, I don't really want to be a historian or a geographer. And now I want to try out sociology.” Because that was one of the courses I was supposed to have taken as an elective my first year, so that became my new passion, because it gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of identity, a sense of curiosity in an area that raised questions about society, order, and power, and so forth. And these were questions I, I was already asking myself anyway as a young person growing up. You know a young high school student - I'm looking around me too and I'm curious about society and why things are the way they are. So sociology really gave me a kind of lens to look at those things through. And that's why I, after my first year I gravitated towards that and I stayed there. When I think about that I think I was probably at that point in my life I was just doing it for me. Only because as I said my parents had these jobs that were above entry level by that point. So there were actually, my father was a supervisor by that point and my mother was in a government job where she had really decent benefits, she had decent working conditions, and she had you know a situation where by that point they were really white collar workers. So by me actually getting an education it wouldn't have meant anything different to them, in other words my, I would never have to contribute to their, let’s say economic success, it was never seen that way. By that point we'd been living in Canada now for 25, 20 to 25 years, by that point, which I actually started at the university.
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