{"id":13133,"date":"2017-01-04T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=13133"},"modified":"2017-01-10T11:03:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-10T19:03:01","slug":"camosun-student-writes-contest-winning-essay-inspired-by-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2017\/01\/04\/camosun-student-writes-contest-winning-essay-inspired-by-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Camosun student writes contest-winning essay inspired by past"},"content":{"rendered":"

He\u2019s a Camosun student now, but eight years ago, at the age of 25, Justin Scott wasn\u2019t, and he was sick and tired of being sick and tired.<\/p>\n

Suffering from an addiction to methamphetamine and going through spiritual despair, Scott says he decided to go to his parents and isolate himself from his fellow drug users.<\/p>\n

Today, the Open the Doors contest (part of a campaign to lower tuition costs and make education more accessible in BC) gives students a chance to tell their post-secondary stories. Scott used his experiences to enter in the contest and came out a winner.<\/p>\n

For his contest entry, Scott wrote in his essay\u2014which won him the third-place $1,000 prize\u2014that the itch to use and abuse drugs was still there, but that he\u2019s currently winning the battle with addiction, having been clean since 2008. Scott says post-secondary was a key factor in his recovery.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Camosun student Justin Scott recently took home a $1,000 prize in a post-secondary writing contest (photo by Jill Westby\/Nexus<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI was a meth user for ten years,\u201d says Scott. \u201cI pretty much just locked myself away from everybody I knew for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many success stories include treatment, meetings, and therapy; Scott says that wasn\u2019t the path he chose.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter 10 years of just losing everything in my life, I decided to quit and was able to just stop,\u201d he says. \u201cI had a business and cars and a house. I really lost everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the detoxification process, Scott yearned for a sense of meaning and inertia that he says drugs robbed him of.<\/p>\n

\u201cPost-secondary education was really what saved my life after getting clean,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t have education, or a job to go to, so I really had to work myself up to getting to post-secondary education. Having money to be stable with, actually having something to go to every day and do\u2026 keeping myself busy was probably the saving factor that kept me off of drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott graduated from the Health Care Assistant program at Camosun in 2011. But five years later, he realized a change of pace was needed; he\u2019s now back at Camosun, in his second year of Electrical Engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was quite the journey to reset my life and get into school, because I didn\u2019t have any support,\u201d he says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t get a student loan because I had no financial history. So I got a real job and was able to prove I was worthy of a loan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) president Al Morrison says that the CCFA was one of many BC faculty associations supporting the Open the Doors campaign. Morrison says that opening the doors to education, much like the name of the campaign suggests, is vital.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll colleges are coming together, basically wanting to share a message with the politicians, be it the current party in power, or whatever; we just want to make awareness of the challenges that students are facing in post-secondary going toward the May election,\u201d says Morrison. \u201cWe thought we would do that through a campaign where students shared their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He\u2019s a Camosun student now, but eight years ago, at the age of 25, Justin Scott wasn\u2019t, and he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Suffering from an addiction to methamphetamine and going through spiritual despair, Scott says he decided to go to his parents and isolate himself from his fellow drug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-january-4-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13133"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13136,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13133\/revisions\/13136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}