Twenty-one-year-old Kira Steele will soon be bursting with pride when she earns a psychology degree from Trent University, but she'd be too embarrassed to hang the actual certificate on her office wall.

Clutching her books and bouncing in her seat during a bumpy city bus ride to school, Steele explains that after studying long nights through the last four years, she's excited to become a psychometrist - someone who tests children for learning disabilities.

But Trent's degree won't make it into her office because she says it doesn't look professional: she thinks it looks like a mere photo-copied piece of paper.

"You spend years of your life here, spend $40,000, and then get handed this piece of crap paper that you just spent four years working for," Steele says indignantly.

It's a snowy Monday afternoon on the express bus to the university's east bank and Steele is on her way to class.

Like the other fresh-faced students who are dressed in trendy clothes, staring out the mud-splattered windows and absorbed in the music pumping through their headphones, Steele gets more fired-up about university issues than what's grabbing national headlines.

A heated topic among peers, for example, is the school's registrar's office which she says is painstakingly slow with information. She says the exam schedule, for example, had just came out two weeks ago when exams were about a month away.

It's a joke on campus, she says, that the office is behind on technology.

During her freshman year, grades, class schedules and dates of grad ceremonies weren't put online. "But that's all changing now," says the Montreal native. "For the better."

She says she doesn't like Peterborough because there are few big name stores for shopping: American Eagle Outfitters, Old Navy, "or even The Bay."

"And the downtown is going to hell," she says, adding she'll be moving to New Brunswick after graduation to be closer to her fiancé's family. "Every time I turn around there's always another store closing."

She says she has heard Peterborough is beautiful in the summer, but admits she wouldn't know because few students stick around that long.

Gzowski college ugly?

Across the bus, 25-year-old Trent student Hugh Mather says talk on campus is that the new Gzowski college is just plain ugly.

The sixth-year computer science student says he partly came here from Gravenhurst because the campus was so beautiful.

But the yellow building with funky windows doesn't match the other traditional architecture, he says. "And I know it cost a lot of money - that's the joke," he says.

But don't get him wrong, Mather says, he loves the small school with a friendly atmosphere that's well-respected by potential employers.

See the Peterborough Examiner for the balance of the article.