Georgian, where?

In 1999 I turned 19, graduated with my OAC certificate from high school, purchased my first car, probably did some other momentous life achievement-type things that I honestly can't remember, and started college.

The idea of moving away to a new city to study something that I wasn't entirely sure I'd like, was ridiculously scary and not very practical for me, so I stayed close to home. Yay local community college...

Georgian College (Owen Sound) is an incredibly small school. 400 students tops - and the majority of those are part time studies or people taking refresher courses in computers or accounting. The students are local. No one moves to Owen Sound specifically to go to college, its unheard of; no one, that is, except the Marine students.

There are only a couple places in all of Canada that offer marine training, Owen Sound is one of them. I think, the other place is in Vancouver - but don't quote me on that.

Georgian, when I was there, was a very cliquey school. You had the chefs, and the business students(I was in this group), and the health care students, and the marine students. And nobody ever went out of their way to cross those lines to interact with another social group. It just wasn't done. But you always knew who the Marine students were, especially on the days that they had company interviews because they'd all come to school dressed up in suits - and they were hot!

Anyway, that was 10 years ago. And at that time, I knew that they had marine navigation simulators, but unless you were an actual marine student, you didn't get to see any of it. Apparently the equipment was good, but it was starting to show its age.

In May/June 2008, I went back to Georgian for an evening course on Quickbooks and the hallways that I had been familiar with were all sectioned off and torn apart and covered in tarps - it was a mess. But it was because they were completely re-vamping the entire Marine wing and installing a brand new, state of the art, marine simulator. That's quite an achivement considering a few years ago they were thinking about shutting the program down.

It is now up and running. I sort of wish that I hadn't missed the openhouse but, lucky me, Daily Planet did a piece on it. Take a look, see what we've got in Owen Sound:
Daily Planet: Marine Simulator