I originally tried posting this on Reddit but it was immediately flagged and removed by their content moderation system for reasons that are beyond me. I should preface this by saying that I'm a US-American trans high school senior (12th grade) looking to move to Canada (specifically the Montreal area) after high school because I need to escape the genocide of transgender people in the US under the Trump admin. If you disagree that a genocide is happening, I implore you to take your comments elsewhere.
After some months of research on the Canadian immigration process I've come to the conclusion that getting a student visa is probably my quickest way to get there. Being that I have no work experience outside of food service, getting a job and a work visa straight out of high school is probably out of my reach. The problem is, I was and still am a horrible student. For my freshman and sophomore year I did next to none of my classwork and skipped most of my classes everyday, but since then I've been working to fix this and try to graduate. My school offers an accelerated online credit recovery program that has allowed me to get to the point where I'm on track to graduate if I pass my classes this year, but even still I'm passing with Ds and Cs.
I've been looking into CEGEP schools because they accept international students and have very low entry requirements (basically just a high school diploma), but I still have a lot of anxiety about my chances. My GPA, if I had to estimate, is probably no higher than a 1.0, and last time I checked I was ranked 18 out of around 500 in my class. My question is: what are my realistic options for schools, if any? I'm seriously scared of what will happen to me if I don't leave the country, even now it's currently illegal for me to get HRT in the state that I live in. Although I'd like to study and work in music, but I fear that literally any music school anywhere is completely out of my reach. At this point, I don't really care what I have to do, I'll take absolutely anything if it gets me out of this place. I really need some advice here.
After some months of research on the Canadian immigration process I've come to the conclusion that getting a student visa is probably my quickest way to get there. Being that I have no work experience outside of food service, getting a job and a work visa straight out of high school is probably out of my reach. The problem is, I was and still am a horrible student. For my freshman and sophomore year I did next to none of my classwork and skipped most of my classes everyday, but since then I've been working to fix this and try to graduate. My school offers an accelerated online credit recovery program that has allowed me to get to the point where I'm on track to graduate if I pass my classes this year, but even still I'm passing with Ds and Cs.
I've been looking into CEGEP schools because they accept international students and have very low entry requirements (basically just a high school diploma), but I still have a lot of anxiety about my chances. My GPA, if I had to estimate, is probably no higher than a 1.0, and last time I checked I was ranked 18 out of around 500 in my class. My question is: what are my realistic options for schools, if any? I'm seriously scared of what will happen to me if I don't leave the country, even now it's currently illegal for me to get HRT in the state that I live in. Although I'd like to study and work in music, but I fear that literally any music school anywhere is completely out of my reach. At this point, I don't really care what I have to do, I'll take absolutely anything if it gets me out of this place. I really need some advice here.