I’m gonna give you some fair warning here. In spite of how chipper my last post was, this blog is likely going to be filled with what I like to call ‘real talk’. This means that I’m unlikely to sugar-coat things when I feel they suck. This will not be a ‘Yay UBC, school spirit and happiness in all things!’ place. If you want to read that, look elsewhere. This is going to be a legitimate ups and downs kind of narrative. There will be good days and bad days, and I prefer to be honest about it all than pretend. If you’re human and can appreciate that, I invite you to take off your shoes and join me in the lounge.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping track of time. It seems to constantly run away from me, no matter how hard I try to catch up to it. In spite of that, between reading chapters in various textbooks, online quizzes and failed attempts to maintain my sanity, here I am writing another blog post. Maybe I’m hoping that it’ll help me wind down from my 9am-6pm days on campus, the unfortunate norm that has become my first term at UBC.
It’s week 2, guys. As registration deadlines loom ever closer, we’re quickly approaching the moment that the next few months of our lives solidify and become constant. I don’t know about all of you, but my schedule looks completely different from it’s pre-September rendition. I feel like I either drastically overestimated my own abilities, underestimated the intensity of UBC, or both. Between a full course load and part-time work, time has become something of a luxury item in my life. If I could afford more of it, I’d buy all I could. Unfortunately, I’m working within a more realistic dimension – one where time is fleeting, and work is abundant.
For example, I had hoped to take Japanese for my language requirement. Japanese culture and language has long been an interest of mine, having had a few Japanese friends back home. As a typical geek, I’ve also been known to watch the occasional anime and gorge myself on sushi (as well as other Japanese cuisine). As a gamer, I’d always seen the importance of the Japanese market and the effect of its culture in my primary sources of entertainment. In short, I wanted to have a greater understanding and involvement in that world. After making an appearance at all my classes in the first week, reading the course syllabi and various versions of what people are calling “Chapter 1” in all my textbooks, I sat down to take a stab at memorizing my first batch of characters and sounds. It quickly became apparent to me that it was going to be difficult to memorize over 50 new symbols over the course of a few days, and near impossible given my commitments to other intense/time-consuming classes (taking priority as pre-reqs for applying to Computer Science) and part-time work (necessary to pay the bills, which unfortunately keep coming in…). Maybe if I sleep for 3 hours each night instead of 6 I could make it work. I think I would die though.
It’s honestly been a pretty depressing realization for me. I had hoped that I could get out of my comfort zone, and explore something new that I was interested in. Life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to, I guess, and we have to make the tough decisions. Sometimes I think that a stronger, smarter person might be able to make it work, or maybe that I took a wrong turn somewhere and placed myself in this situation. I don’t know what the answer is, but the outcome is the same: no Japanese for me. I’m in French 101 now, which will be considerably easier to manage since I have a bit of a background in it. This is not to say that nothing else I’m taking is interesting, but it’s pretty common that a student’s first year is filled more with required courses than a focus on their real interests, and I feel like I lost a battle before the war had even really begun.
If we were sitting outside sipping a coffee, I might launch into a related rant touching on flaws I see in the existing educational system. As you searched for the right moment to politely get up and leave, I’d segue into how business interests and profit chasing have negatively affected the quality of education at a post-secondary level, and increased stress and mental health issues in students while draining their often limited resources in what is already widely considered a poor
economy. I’d touch on how 40-60% averages are not only the norm, but entirely expected or advertised, and failing (in spite of the time and money invested in any given class) is simply viewed as a casualty of being a student. Maybe we’ll have that conversation one day. Maybe you’ll want to have it with me, and we could conjure a better way to learn, grow, and explore our identities as young adults.
Instead I’ll wish you all good luck in this term and the next, in case I forget to in January.
Had you asked me a year ago where I thought I’d be today, I probably would have told you about working my I.T. job, finding a nice apartment in or around Niagara Falls, camping in Northern Ontario, and spending obscene amounts of time playing and collecting video games. The life I’d built, and just about all my family and friends were in Niagara. It seemed reasonable to me to stay and try launching a career in Ontario. There had always been a part of me that wanted to come out here and continue my education, but it had seemed the less likely, prohibitively expensive option.