About

Andrea Levy was born in 1967 in Hamilton ON and attended Parkside High School from 1981 to 1986. Andrea had ADD which was not diagnosed until she was in her forties, and school was very difficult. Her grades were mediocre at best. 

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Andrea (by some miracle of god) was accepted to and attended York University from 1986 to 1989. She really wanted to drop out because she wasn't interested in the classroom. Andrea chose English Literature as a major after she found out from a Registrar that she could graduate most easily from that programme.  Three courses would do it and her parents would be happy  that she finished. Since she had no interest in further education, it was enough. She was a good daughter if nothing else.

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Andrea's university grades were better than her high school grades, but still pretty abysmal. Her university experience included involvement in learning opportunities outside of the classroom including the Vanier College Newspaper, and Vanier College/University politics.

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Andrea Graduated from York (by the skin of her teeth after getting a C- in Literary Theory) in 1989. While she swore never to take another university course, she did take a course in Gerontology and a couple of others in Social Work, achieving no grade higher than a B+ (79%) ever.

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For thirty years, Andrea practiced life learning. She became a Jill of all trades and master-of-none and spent time working in the social services, construction administration, as a stay-at-home mother, and later had her own kosher catering and seasonal kosher restaurant in Niagara Falls, ON. Andrea currently works for Kars4Kids as an Inbound Sales and Customer Service representative, but the opportunity for advancement is very limited because she works remotely.

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In May of 2017, Andrea had a health crisis and had a drastic change of lifestyle, resulting in a large weight loss. There were a lot of unintended side effects, including a radical improvement of health, some resolution to her lifelong disordered eating, and a host of changes in her ways of thinking. Andrea learned about metabolic disorders and people started asking her for help with their own health journeys.

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Andrea was happy to share her lived experience but understood that she needed credibility to provide meaningful help and in a rash decision in August of 2020, a week before school started, signed up for a post-graduate certificate in Nutrition for Sport and Performance at Niagara College. 

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It was an incredibly difficult course, and it was science-based. Her last science grade had been a D+ in Natural Science in her first year at York. It was like drinking from a fire hose. She thought about quitting. She did not quit. Her cumulative average was 95% when all was done.

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Realizing that a fundamental shift had happened in the thirty-plus years since she had graduated from York, Andrea started researching options for further education. For a while, a dream was medical school but at 54, she found it unlikely the province would subsidize her education because of the low chance of return on investment for the government. Never mind the poor academic record!

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Becoming a Dietician did not seem to be a great option, because the College of Dieticians is not in favour of ketogenic diets and repeatedly brings their members to tribunals when they don't toe the line.

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She thought about taking courses in Cognitive Science and then going to graduate school but did not have any pre-requisites to take the 'good' courses.

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One day, her family physician told her she should be a nurse. He told her that nurses can practice in all sorts of ways and that he thought that she should be working with people and coaching them in lifestyle changes. It was possible to do a second start BscN or a College level RPN to BscN. The physician mentioned the 16 month RPN programme at the college level which might be a faster way to gain admittance to the BscN programme.

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Andrea researched both options. In both cases, she did not have the prerequisites or grades to be admitted. A representative from the York University BscN programme told her that if she did complete the 4.5 courses she needed as prerequisites,  and raised her average, there MIGHT be a chance she would be accepted as a second start student. There was also a chance that she might do all that work and not be accepted. For the RPN programme, she needed grades over 85% in English, Biology, Chemistry, and Math. Having achieved an 80%  Math grade in 1985, Andrea set to work improving her Grade 12 English grade, and taking Biology and Chemistry, which she had never taken before. If she's lucky, she won't have to do Math over.

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Andrea started ENG4C, and signed up to take Biology and Chemistry in person, in person at the Adult Education Programme of the Hamilton Catholic School Board, starting December 8th, 2021.

 

Note from Andrea:

I sincerely wish I could use my own life to talk about resilience, but that book hasn't been written yet and it's not fiction! Stay tuned!

 

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