It was a night of bringing back old memories for Lethbridge College alumni who talked about their successes and downfalls in post-secondary.

Lethbridge College hosted an event called Sopoksisstsosi, which is Blackfoot for gaining knowledge through experience.

It featured three alumni of the college: Cathy Twigg, graduate of the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Education program, Steven Bruised Head, graduate of the Agricultural Technology program and Tawnya Plain Eagle, graduate of the Digital Communications and Media program.

The three alumni spoke on their post-secondary experiences to help motivate current students and to make them aware of the importance of self-care which was the purpose of this event says Pam Blood, career and academic advisor at the college.

Plain Eagle, the youngest of the three speakers, is currently in her final year of the Bachelor of Communications program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

Before applying for the DCM program at the college, she was upgrading in math because she wanted to be a legal assistant.

However, her passion was for media and entertainment which drove her to apply for the media course at the college.

During her first year, she went through some struggles causing her to fail some courses.

The courses she failed, were only offered during the winter semester, meaning she had to wait until the winter semester the following year to re-take the courses.

This caused a setback in her journey and she had to make a whole new group of friends since her friends from her first year got to move on to their second-year courses.

Plain Eagle believes this event is important since mental health is a big struggle in the Indigenous community with the suicide rate being very high.

“We definitely lived through the challenges that these students are currently going through. If we, especially myself, can come back and offer that little bit of advice that can continue to motivate some of the students, I think that is very important.”

With mental health being such a big focus these days, Plain Eagle added she is glad the college is putting on this event for students to receive the reassurance from alumni and she wishes this kind of event existed when she went to the college.

When the speakers finished talking about their post-secondary experiences, the audience got a chance to ask them questions and help the students get advice specifically for them.

This event was made possible through grant funding the college received to increase mental health initiatives available for Indigenous students.

Blood says the event was successful and hopes more events like this will happen in the future.