When Dan McDonald moved to Calgary after high school, he was not looking for another classroom. He had finished high school with what he calls the absolute bare minimum, carrying a stark belief about education: “I hated high school,” he recalls. “I thought school was a scam.”
At the time, going to college felt unlikely. Law school would have seemed impossible. Years later, Dan is a student in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary, a path he says began when Bow Valley College helped him see school, and life, very differently.
“If you would have asked me in high school if I’d go to law school, I would have said, ‘no way, you’re crazy!’” he shares.
Originally from Nova Scotia, Dan came west with his family and found work at the Delta Hotel Calgary South. As a bellman, he discovered something high school had not brought out in him: he liked connecting with people.
After about a year, he began wondering whether hospitality was where he wanted to stay. “I don’t think I could do this the rest of my life,” he remembers thinking.
That question, “what else could I do?”, opened the first door. Dan completed the Emergency Medical Responder program at SAIT. He did not pursue that career path, but the experience challenged what he had believed about school.
“It kind of showed me maybe I am good at school,” he says, “and maybe some of those beliefs I had in high school weren’t actually true.”
The next spark came from two coworkers at the hotel who had developmental disabilities. Dan got to know these individuals and became curious about the support workers who came to assist them. The more he learned about that work, the more it appealed to him.
Without experience or education in the field, Dan struggled to break in. Then, at the last minute, he applied to Bow Valley College’s Disability Studies program and got in.
Instead of completing only the one-year certificate, the program changed the direction of his life. “I absolutely loved it,” he says. “I found the program was transformative.”
Through his courses, Dan began to understand disability not only as a personal experience, but as something shaped by history, systems, barriers, and social attitudes. It was difficult, but it gave him a clearer sense of purpose.
“It sparked a fire in my spirit,” he says. “I wanted to do something about this.”
Bow Valley College did more than provide Dan with a credential. It helped him rebuild his relationship with learning. For the first time, school did not feel like something to survive. It felt like something he could use.
He completed the two-year Disability Studies Diploma, motivated by the sense that what he was learning mattered beyond the classroom.
His instructors helped connect theory to practice. Dan remembers faculty members including Michelle Cole, Donna Jones, and Elizabeth McGillivray, who pushed students to think deeply about disability, dignity, advocacy, and the systems people must navigate.
Michelle Cole, now an associate dean in the School of Community Studies, remembers that curiosity: “Dan was a deep thinker who never stopped at the surface of a topic,” she says. “He often asked the next question, that moved discussions beyond the course content and into a deeper exploration of the concepts and their broader context.”
The program’s practicums gave Dan opportunities to apply classroom learning in real settings and see what strong support could look like. Faculty helped connect him with community agencies, and Dan accessed Student Services, working with Alana, a counsellor he describes as pivotal.
Instead of feeling like a number, Dan felt that people at the college were invested in him. “This school truly wanted me to succeed,” he says.
After graduating, Dan began working with the Calgary Scope Society, first as a community support worker and later in outreach and program coordination. He supported people with complex mental health and behavioural challenges, including individuals who had spent years in psychiatric care because the system had no clear place for them to go.
In those environments, Dan saw how quickly people could be reduced to risk, diagnosis, or behaviour — and how much advocacy could change what others were able to see.
One story has stayed with him. A psychiatric unit manager once told him she had never been more scared of a patient in 30 years of nursing. Over time, using the skills and perspective he developed at Bow Valley College, Dan and his colleagues helped staff see the person underneath their fears.
“They started to see his human side,” Dan says. A person who had been feared began to be understood and treated with more dignity. “It was inspiring to see the impact of humanizing a person who has been demonized by the system, ”he says.
That work eventually pointed Dan toward an even larger platform for advocacy. Through coordinating care for individuals, navigating systems, and speaking with government representatives, lawyers, Crown prosecutors, and defense lawyers, he began to see law as another way to support people whose voices were often overlooked.
Bow Valley College’s transfer pathway from the Disability Studies Diploma into the University of Calgary’s Bachelor of Community Rehabilitation helped open that next door. Dan says the pathway likely made a future possible that would have remained closed if he had needed to apply based only on his high school grades.
Today, law school is not a departure from the work Dan began in Disability Studies. It is an extension of it: another way to advocate for dignity, access, and systems that see people more fully.
“Dan's path does not surprise me at all,” Michelle says. “He was an advocate for himself, his peers and the people he worked for while at Bow Valley College and in the disability sector. Going into law school is a great fit and I can't wait to see the difference he will make as a lawyer.”
Dan describes the impact of the college simply: “Bow Valley College changed my life.”
And that change continues to unfold — in the people he has supported, the systems he hopes to improve, and the advocacy he is preparing to carry into the legal profession.
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