Voices

Interview - Sara

00:00 / 00:00

Interview - Laura

00:00 / 00:00

Observations from a Non-Mature Researcher's Perspective...

I had the chance to interview 2 students I met at the Ban Righ Centre. From my interview participants, I learned several things.

I first found that I have empathy with one of them, who is an international mature student. She was struggling with language when she first came to Canada, and the counselors of the Ban Righ helped her a lot to encourage her and improve her language skills. The language issue she had is also the issue that I’m facing because I'm an international student as well, hence I had empathy for her. Her experience also proves that the Ban Righ aims to make everyone feel home, no matter where you come from.

Secondly, I found astonishment. Interviewing these mature students was my first time talking to people who had been away from school for quite a long time and I feel very astonished. Normally, they already had a stable occupation before coming back to school. As a non-mature student, I think choosing to back to school is a very brave decision because I’ve never thought about that, and I can’t really imagine that. Meanwhile, I admire these mature students and I also found encouragement from them, which makes me believe that everyone can choose their life no matter what background they had in the past.

Interview - Bella

00:00 / 00:00

Interview - Ellen

00:00 / 00:00

Interview - Alyssa

00:00 / 00:00

Interview - Lisa

00:00 / 00:00

Interview - Carole

00:00 / 00:00

Observations from a Mature Researcher's Perspective...

I had the chance to interview 4 students and 2 advisors at the Ban Righ Center.

As I talked with each participant, I noticed that new questions or ideas would come to my mind, inspired by the story of the interviewee or the interaction of our dialogue. I enjoyed this very much.

I noticed that the advisors at Ban Righ were happy to share the kind of spiritual reward and joy that they receive from their service: women's treating them as friends with whom to share their stories, seeing women go through the steps of their education and achieve their dreams, and seeing women and men support the Ban Righ Center.

It was very beautiful to interview other mature students: it gave me the possibility to engage and talk with some of them, whom I had never chatted with before, and to get to hear something about their unique personality in the short but meaningful time of our recordings.

To me the most interesting thing was to see women's description of why they had chosen their majors, each of them described their passion clearly, showing that most of them had returned to school to follow their passion.

I also loved seeing their unique point of view of the Ban Righ, what they like and where and when they can see meaning and connection, it felt like wearing someone else's "eyes" for a second, which I loved.

Interestingly, I noticed that the type of place, room, object or medium that women picked as a symbol of their attachment to the Ban Righ, somehow was connected to their study and career area of interest.