Sakshi Bhatia, a Loyalist College student, reached Belleville city for the first time.
By Armaanjeet Kaur [1] and Sandeep Kaur [2]
BELLEVILLE – Managing to have a job while going to school is a new thing for many international students, especially for Indian students.
“It was a big challenge for me,” says Sakshi Bhatia, who never worked back home while she was going to school.
Having a job at the same time as going to school is new for her.
“To handle living expenses, it is necessary to work in Canada,” said Bhatia, a project management student at Loyalist. That’s because, for many international students, their parents don’t pay for the expense of living in Canada.
Bhatia says that it was a challenging task in the beginning to manage studying and working. She says both things suffered. Sometimes, she was late for work, and sometimes she missed assignments.
“That was my lowest point,” said Bhatia.
“I cried a lot, and here I thought it was a bad decision to come here.”
She says things got better as the months passed. She made a timetable and managed her schedule according to it.
Nimapreet Kaur is a first-year paralegal student.
“It was tough to find a job,” she said. That’s because she never had a job in India, so she has no experience in finding work.
Now she is working at McDonald’s.
“I love working with them,” says Nimapreet Kaur.
Yashmeen Kaur is another student from India who has never had a job while in school.
She arrived in Canada last year and is studying as a social service worker at Loyalist College.
She agrees that without any job experience, it is hard to get a job in Canada.
After finishing her first semester in the program, she updated her resume and looked for work in her program area.
It took her a while, but she eventually found a job in the social service sector.
Then came a new challenge.
She said the most difficult point in her life was when she began working and studying at the same time.
Managing both work and school was hard. She missed some assignments, which severely impacted her studies and grades.
But after that, she learned time management skills and set aside time for study and work.
“Now I am getting good grades learning several things in a job as well as in the class,” Yashmeen said.