Mark Wood

Yes Sir!, that is where I am working full time on a 4 month contract making some GOOD money. I am finally out of school and into the real working force. Sadly right now there is no permanent full time position available but hopefully with all the movement in the area I am working in, something will open up and they will hold a competition for a position that I am able to get hired for. Or they keep me working the same job for 18 months and I can get automatically rolled into the position I have right now.

School went well. I will admit that it was not one of my best semesters and there are a few reasons behind that. No, I will not make excuses, I know I could have tried harder, but I didn’t, but still managed to graduate. The first reason was because it was my 4th year in college. I know that does not seem long at all, but when you are without money for that long, it’s hard. Another is have 16 hours of work placement, and having to find a part time job to have some cash flow and keep the debt down, on top of going to school for 15 hours a week and having to do homework. Then lastly, there was my teacher. I’m not going to name any names out of respect, but it just seemed as though the teacher did not know what was going on. They made it hard to follow what they were teaching so it was hard to know exactly what they expected of us.

But I managed to get passed that all and get a really nice paying job and graduating on time, when I wanted to. My graduation is Friday June 13th at 10am at St.Lawrence College. All are welcome.

Nothing else has changed for me. I am still living with my grandmother Sandy right now in her two room apartment. I live in my room between jobs. Oh yes, that’s right! Not only am I working 9 to 5 at MoHLTC, but I am also still working at Starbucks at the Chapters on Princess Street. I figure that working there will help me to pay off my student loan a little bit faster as well as help me get the things I want; namely an apartment/house of my own, a car to travel to and from work. I have a few extra things I want as well, but until I have a permanent full time position somewhere making some really good money, I don’t have any plans to travel. There are many places I want to go, but I want to have some savings for my future first.

I have so much more information that I should update, but I think I will cut this short right now and try and make smaller updates so I don’t lapse on making updates like I have been. I have been hearing things about twitter and how it is a good little tool to quickly update people on the day to day things I am doing between the larger blog posts everything else. I might get into it, but I’m still not sure about it. Let me know if you have any good or bad experiences with twitter and I will see what people have to say about it.

Peace for now.

Here is a recent article I wrote introducing myself to the student body at St. Lawrence College in Kingston. I wrote the article for the NOMAD so that the students could find out who I am and a bit about me since I am the Director of “The School of Computer and Engineering Technology and School of Skilled Trades and Tourism”. (Man they need to change the name to something smaller.)

Tall, brown hair, brown eyes and a wonderful smile. These are only a few of the things I have to offer. I came to Kingston in 2003 because at the time my mother had separated from her husband. I had just gone threw flight training at the Moncton Flight College and earned my powered wing with cadets and my private pilots license with the government of Canada. I took a year off to earn some money for my future at College. I finally quit once I was accepted into the Computer Networking and Technical Support program. This was going to be the best two years of my life. That was until I lost interest in my third semester. Since I only had one more semester to go, I decided that I needed to stick with the program and graduate with distinction. And that I did. In 2006 I graduated from the CN&TS program with distinctions.

During my last semester, I decided that there was another path I wanted to take in order for me to further my growth with technology. I wanted to take the Computer Programmer Analyst program. So I enrolled in to the CPA program and was automatically placed into the second year of the program because the CN&TS course and the CPA course have the same first year (apart from one or two courses that I have ended up doing). I am currently in my last year of the 3-year CPA program. I am currently working for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care down beside the Live Venue Entertainment Center (LVEC) or what every they have changed the name to now.

Once I graduate from the Computer Programming Analyst program, I plan on moving off to Ottawa and looking for a job in either one of my fields. Hopefully finding something with the government. For now I am going to place my focuses on being a great student director and getting another diploma with distinctions. Thank you for electing me as your student Director of the School of Computer Engineering and Technology and School of Skilled Trades and Tourism.