Category Archives: Involvement

Flashback to September 2011. A slightly dorky, bespectacled first-year shows up on UBC campus, becomes addicted to Blue Chip cookies, and is instantly overwhelmed by the amount of involvement opportunities on campus. Late one night, while avoiding her biology readings, she spots a call for SLC Active Promotions Leaders on Twitter and decides to apply. For reasons unknown, the committee wants to hire her despite spluttering like an idiot for a few minutes during her interview about how she knows nothing about the conference (“but I’m a fast learner!”).

Fast-forward to now, three days post-conference. Over the past few months, I’ve addressed 400-person lecture halls, logged a ton of hours in the Centre for Student Involvement, received more emails than I have in the last 18 years combined, handed out hundreds of rave cards, and put holes in a pair of flats from running around Buchanan on Saturday. Most importantly, I’ve been a part of a fantastic and supportive team composed of amazing and involved UBC students who have inspired me to make the most of my university experience. Also, we quote SNL videos and have dance parties together, which is pretty cool.

The moral of this long-winded blog post? If you see an opportunity, go for it, regardless of whether or not you think it’ll work out. In the words of my homeboy Teddy Roosevelt: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse to never have tried to succeed.” True story.

For those of you who didn’t get to attend the SLC and are looking to get a taste of what it was like (or you’re avoiding studying in Irving like I am), here’s our opening video and the two keynotes’ TED talks for your viewing pleasure.

We promise your SLC breakthrough moment won’t be quite this messy…

Registration for the 2012 Student Leadership Conference is now open. Get hit with your breakthrough on January 14th.

The SLC is a day-long conference dedicated to helping students reach their leadership goals. With amazing keynotes, fantastic workshops, incredible community initiatives and innovative case studies, anyone can find the tools they need to reach their own breakthrough. There’s only one question to ask: What’s stopping you? That’s right, nothing.

PS: I think this video gets better and better every time I watch it, although I still cringe every time I watch the paint splatter in my face. Shout out to Erica and her editing skills for the awesome promo video.

The UBC Vancouver delegates, obviously showing everyone at UBCO how really, really, ridiculously good-looking their sister campus is…

That being said, the UBCO SLC was much smaller compared to its Vancouver counterpart due to UBCO’s small campus size: there were 250 delegates as opposed to the over a thousand students who attend the UBC Vancouver SLC. Instead of an opening and closing keynote, there was a single keynote speaker at the beginning of the day. The rest of the conference consisted of the delegates attending three concurrent workshops with a lunch break in the middle (which I had been looking forward to almost as much as the conference itself. If there’s one thing a university student loves, it’s a free meal), followed by a closing ceremony. There were a wide variety of workshops, ranging from diversity to global citizenship to public speaking. I personally attended “Social networking”, “The power of positive thinking” and “Do what you love, love what you do”. All of them were really helpful and informative, and I’m definitely coming back to Vancouver with some new knowledge.

Another really cool aspect of the day was talking to all the UBCO students. It was great to get a feel for what their student life is like and how it compares to UBC Vancouver (expect a blog post on that in the next couple of days). We also all got to be filmed by a helicopter post-conference as we spelled out the letters “UBC” in the field for a recruitment video. It was good times, even though I felt like a bit of an idiot jumping up and down for a minute straight. Keep an eye out for the video in the future: I’m that little speck in the fur-lined parka.

Ray Zahab, the SLC keynote and generally awesome human being

But the highlight of the day, at least for me, was the keynote speaker, Ray Zahab. He went from a pack-a-day smoker to an ultra-marathon runner in two and a half years, and ended up running across the entire Sahara desert in 111 days.  Matt Damon made a documentary about his adventure, Running the Sahara, which focuses not only on the expedition itself but also on the water crisis in northern Africa. (I’m definitely planning on watching it as soon as I get my two midterms out of the way this week.) When he returned from Africa, Ray started his own company, impossible2Possible, which is dedicated to giving youth the chance to go on similar adventures, and to see just how much they are capable of when they really push themselves.

We’re at a world-class school in a wealthy, developed country, living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As university students, the entire world is an open book to us. We’re free to go down whichever path we want, free to choose our own adventure, and while it may not involve running a marathon a day for three months straight, if you’re willing to work impossibly hard to achieve your goal, it is within your reach. I haven’t found my Sahara just yet, but when it presents itself, I know that I will stop at nothing until I’ve reached the finish line. If you walked into my room right now, you would see the words “NO LIMITS” scrawled in huge letters across my mirror, just to remind myself every day that anything is possible.